Delivering in a Shorter Timeframe: How to Save Costs Without Compromising on Quality

Bringing time to market forward by a week can reduce out of pocket expenses by $6 million. Yes, really. $6 million.

It seems so simple doesn’t it? Save time and save money. The questions is: ‘How?’

Rather than saving an hour here and there, reducing cycle times and ultimately reducing the time between key milestones is the key to real transformation.

The ‘patent clock’ starts ticking at the point of registration, so bringing forward commercialization has a significant impact on the value that can be realized post-launch.

Many of the key milestones in the development process require the production of documentation. Here are some examples:

• Technology transfers (both within the organization and to an external partner)
• Annual Product Reviews (APRs)
• New Drug Applications (NDAs)
• Biological License Applications (BLAs)

A large amount of the time to produce such documentation is spent finding, reformatting, collating/combining and checking data, requiring significant time and input from a range of people across multiple organizational functions.

Removing wasted time

Take the generation of a technology transfer dossier as an example. The typical turnaround time is 3-4 months, depending on the stage of transfer, with up to 30% of this time spent gathering and verifying data.

And that’s not all. In 2005, a survey of over 100 biopharmaceutical companies revealed that development scientists were spending several hours a week searching for data – and up to 20% of the time, this data wasn’t even available. Hardly an efficient use of time…

So, what’s the solution?

An electronic Development Record (eDR) reduces and even eliminates many of the data collation and checking activities. It not only saves effort, it can bring forward the delivery of a technology transfer dossier by at least three weeks.

When you consider that a typical development phase (post early research and prior to clinical trials) accounts for three years and 20-25% of the associated costs of bringing a drug to market, that three weeks doesn’t sound like a huge amount of time to save – but it could be worth $18 million…

To find out how our technology and domain expertise enables users to link data to data, data to people and people to people to drive innovation, achieve faster time to market and improve margins, contact us here.