By Tara Rockers, Business Development Manager - Life Sciences
Industry events are a great way for Life Sciences professionals to stay up-to-date with the latest developments while also exploring practical guidance on how technology can be leveraged to streamline processes. We recently had the pleasure of attending and speaking at the Pharma/Biotech GTN Summit in Philadelphia with Gross to Net (GTN) experts, Pharosity Consulting. Our partnership with Pharosity aims to deliver best-in-class GTN capabilities across leading pharmaceutical and biotech organizations. Our teams can help navigate the complex world of GTN and improve information sharing across multiple disciplines, so customers can make the most informed decisions possible.
The goal of the Pharma/Biotech GTN Summit was to help leading Life Science companies deliver more effective forecasts while enhancing visibility, profitability, and control through best practices for Gross to Net management.
During the second day of the event, Evan Smith, Managing Consultant at TwelveCG, and Brian Barbash, Partner at Pharosity spoke on stage. The Architecting the Blueprint for GTN Solution Implementations session highlighted:
Various modeling platforms and comparisons of prevailing approaches
Right-fitting the solution to the organization
Key factors to consider when upscaling technology
Why Anaplan fits the GTN ecosystem
Gross to Net forecast and accrual methodologies with examples and associated results
Project expectations, including sample timelines, scope, recognizable value, and observed ROI
While we covered various solutions and methodologies for Pharma manufacturers to consider throughout our presentation, we think it’s important to avoid pre-built solutions for GTN because they do not prioritize the needs of a customer’s products. Given that Gross to Net processes can be complex, labor intensive, and subject to frequent changes, a flexible platform like Anaplan is necessary to simplify this complexity whilst allowing greater control over financial operations. Anaplan also differentiates itself due to its ability to easily change methodologies or adapt as an organization continues to scale. With features such as real-time reporting and a consistent process across business functions, more Pharma companies are turning towards Anaplan as their preferred GTN calculation platform.
The TwelveCG team specializes in implementing Anaplan-based GTN solutions. The expertise we bring not only comes from completing GTN implementations with Pharaosity, who bring Pharma-specific best practices, but also from our 645+ Anaplan projects across a wide variety of industries and use cases. Based on our deep technological expertise, our presentation expanded further into how Anaplan's powerful technology makes it an ideal choice for GTN:
1. Functional Variation
Since Anaplan is configurable and customizable, we can tailor the platform to best fit a company’s business needs. There is no need to conform to a process just because of software limitations. While the possibilities are endless, we’ve learned best practices throughout GTN implementations across the industry that allows us to help customers accelerate the implementation timeline while keeping costs in line with those of a pre-built solution.
2. Expected ROI
There are several tangible benefits our Life Sciences clients observe using Anaplan as their GTN platform. Our clients see an increase in forecasting and accrual accuracy. With shifting time to value-add activities, forecasts become more granular and analysts are factoring in account, market, and product knowledge into their projections more effectively. This additional rigor coupled with improved methodologies reduces errors and irregularities. Thus, better forecasting will lead to better inputs into accrual calculations and improve accrual true-up accuracy.
Along with improved accuracy, manufacturers are seeing a dramatic increase in time savings compared to their previous processes. Instead of spending weeks hunting down data and forecasts from across the company, it will be readily available in real-time; as the Anaplan ecosystem grows into different use cases across the enterprise, the time savings can grow exponentially. Different divisions can sync their data in real-time and have comfort knowing the data is the most recent instance.
3. Version Coordination, Tracking, Access, and Visibility
One challenge many of our customers previously struggled with was versioning issues in Excel. Going with a software solution like Anaplan eliminates the guessing of which version is the most current, or if a colleague already has the document checked out. With Anaplan, all work is done simultaneously and saved to the cloud, so users can work in the same model at the same time and see real-time data updated instantly.
Another advantage is the ability to save and copy models to keep prior forecasts for analysis at different points in time. For example, you can copy prior forecasts and plan several scenarios at the same time with minimal coordination with other end users.
When it comes to access, Anaplan allows admins to set access at any level of the model. For example, access can be set at a role (different pages and processes), list (certain subsections of dimensions), or line item level (individual intersection of data).
Manufacturers are often unable to view the impact of pricing or contracting actions across customers, with particular difficulty in measuring the impacts of Price Protection and Medicaid liability. With Anaplan’s inherent functionality, users can see all liabilities across their entire portfolio seamlessly.
4. Documentation and Auditability of Rationale
Anaplan’s built-in software allows for automatic audit trail creation. The platform provides visibility into seeing all of the changes across the entire model over a period of time and allows the ability to drill into an intersection of data to see who was the last person to make that change and the previous value. This is a critical component for upholding certain controls and audit processes. Additionally, organizations without adequate systems and processes in place to accumulate and process pricing adjustment data volume struggle to understand their product profitability at a consolidated level.
5. Multi-Departmental Dependencies and Widespread Manual File Sharing
Anaplan is a central repository to reconcile various sources of data for clean, reliable hierarchies, and master data available to analysts around the enterprise. This helps facilitate the sharing of data based on status and attributes, plus removes the need for point-to-point interfaces. Additionally, Anaplan eliminates the Excel scalability constraints from expanding product portfolios and increased contracting activity, which often lead to size and performance drawbacks, lack of collaboration across business units and long forecasting cycle times.
See the Gross to Net Demo in Action
We’re proud to have sponsored the Pharma/Biotech GTN Summit and had a fantastic time networking with other Life Sciences practitioners. It was an honor to speak on stage with Pharosity, specifically about how Anaplan fits into the Gross to Net ecosystem. We believe that Anaplan’s powerful technology makes it an ideal choice for GTN because of its ability to handle unique GTN processes, while simultaneously connecting people, data, and plans in real-time.
If you missed us at the Summit or want to see the Gross to Net demo in action, feel free to schedule time with me here.