Pharma Companies face increasing operational challenges in the digital era. They must compete to offer affordable, uninterrupted services, all whilst improving their overall employee and customer experience. The adoption of AI and intelligent automation technologies in their operations can bring significant benefits in terms of innovation, cost competitiveness, and revenue growth, as well as improvements in customer and employee experience.
Below are the 10 top use cases for RPA and Intelligent Automation in pharma companies. (Note – many more exist)
Product Categorization
Multinational companies require a necessary degree of correspondence between local and global SKUs. Products across markets require different strategies due to variances in definitions and constituents. The effectiveness of marketing strategies relies on robust, accurate, and swift product categorization. E-commerce platforms and retail shops deal with thousands to millions of products, increasing the chance of human-related errors which affect the customer's shopping experience
Leveraging IA solutions allows for the possibility of managing products across local and global markets. Accurate categorization of products applicable for legacy or obsolete systems and cross-referencing of products using multiple data formats can enable rapid categorization and turnover time.
Product Management
Suppliers regularly update their prices and stock statuses without updating resellers. So, resellers need to constantly visit a supplier’s website to determine which products may have changed and how. If a purchase has been made without updating produce prices or statuses, this might lead to a loss in sales and reputation.
Instead, an RPA Bot can be programmed to constantly check a partner’s website or partner portal and product data such as price and status daily. An RPA bot can then update the company’s CRM to reflect the changes in prices or product status to ensure the accurate status of each product is always maintained.
Sales Analytics
Sales analytics are vital for various retail decisions such as new product introduction, trade promotions, etc. Data needs to be extracted from multiple data sources or systems and then sales reports are prepared manually. Quite often sales targets and earnings can be affected by delayed or inaccurate sales analysis.
Instead of creating sales analysis reports manually, RPA can be triggered to extract data from multiple sources such as databases, spreadsheets, ERP, etc. Data-driven sales reports can be automatically created based on specified parameters, and the report is formatted and sent to business users. Reports can be stored by RPA in the on-premises cloud and users can be notified of availability by email.
Trade Promotions
Pharma companies regularly process large amounts of trade promotion deductions data across multiple e-commerce platforms. Trade promotion deductions are used to increase demand for certain products through discounting, special pricing, and sampling. But the whole trade promotion deduction process involves intensive manual tasks of consolidating products across multiple internal applications, stores, and departments.
Instead, RPA Bots can be programmed to extract trade promotion deduction data such as deductions documentation, approvals, proof of performance, etc. And once all the information extracted passes pre-configured checks, the RPA bot can perform the end-to-end deduction process, update critical product information, and then clear it against any trade promotion event or activity.
Medicare Data Lookups
US-based healthcare organizations have to look up Medicare numbers in a federal database daily to extract patient data. The activity is simple but labor-intensive, especially for a large healthcare organization that deals with hundreds or thousands of patients a day.
RPA Bots can be programmed to automatically query patient Medicare numbers via the federal database, check the data and extract any necessary information based on the parameters outlined by a healthcare provider. RPA Bots then update the healthcare organization’s internal systems for perusal by doctors and nurses. Notifications of failure or exception reports are generated automatically and escalated to the relevant internal healthcare admin team.
New employee onboarding
Pharma companies hire many people each year. But a typical new employee onboarding process is often manual, cumbersome, and time-consuming. Productivity loss from untimely onboarding can lead to revenue impact. Any delays in onboarding can also impact new employees’ experience of your company and lead them to question their choice of employer. There are also many cases of new employees not having the right IT systems access leading to further frustration and lost productivity.
However, RPA bots can be programmed to query the new employee information such as start date, organization info, access needed, etc. Bots can then execute scripts to enable application access, create tickets for access that need further human approval, update the HR system record keeping, and send a notification sent to an incoming employee manager who is ready and prepared for their new team member to now begins adding value.
Learning and Development
There are certain compulsory training modules pharma staff must complete e.g., product, HR, risk, and compliance training. Intelligent robots can automatically email employees to complete training modules and send reminders until training has been completed. RPA Bots can automatically transfer employees completed training scores and update employee HR systems. RPA can be used to automatically create reports that can be sent to managers or HR staff to see how employees have done, or to ensure managers chase up employees who have yet to complete the required training.
Data Management
Intelligent automation can reduce pharma operations costs and overheads by eliminating manual errors. By applying AI technologies such as machine learning or AI-powered OCR, IT engineers can make tasks like data entry, capture, creation, and update faster and more efficient. Smart automation can connect internal systems with any external source for data processing. Automation simplifies data management workflow, reduces IT operations costs, and increases ROI when applied correctly.
Pharma Systems Health Check
A system health check provides a snapshot of the overall performance of a pharma company’s computer system at any point in time. But monitoring the status of IT devices, and services or are tiresome tasks to handle manually. Intelligent automation processes and task-mining technologies enable the automatic documentation of all steps in a workflow for future investigation or statistical reporting. This significantly reduces the time capture and recording of process flows and flow data for immediate examination by IT engineers who are now able to make data-driven decisions in real time.
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Originally posted in the IRPA AI Network — Intelligent Automation