Our recipe for success
Within the biopharmaceutical industry the cost of drug development continues to rise. To successfully take a drug target from concept to design, into manufacturing and finally to the patient, there needs to be a clear integration of a multi-disciplinary, cross-functional, cross-geography team.
To assist in designing, building, and implementing R&D Operations, we have developed the Integrated Operations and Business Planning (IOBP) framework which focuses on four key areas within R&D Operations: Project, Resource, Financial and Portfolio Management, integrated through a project-centric Operating Model in which senior leaders, project teams, and support functions collaborate.
- “One Set of Numbers” allows all stakeholders access to a single source of approved and planned activities
- Portfolio Visualization empowers better management decisions
- Capacity Management provides organizational visibility to bottlenecked resources and functions
- Integrated Data-Driven Analysis reduces politics and enables informed, objective decisions
- Variance Analysis compares plan to actual and enables continuous improvement and increases accountability
- Standardized Project Plans and Multilevel Planning allows integrated decisions at portfolio, product and task level
The R&D Operations industry evolution
The R&D Operations evolution can be broken down into three periods:
- Resource & Cost-Focus: Evolution began with a focus on trying to understand resource needs in the current year plus one additional year, to enable better forecasting.
- Value Focus: The next evolution shifted to focus on the total product lifecycle, which also evolved with a focus on delivery and value.
- Outcomes-Focus: This ongoing evolution is in the early stages and emphasizes enhancing collaborations through better engagement with CROs (contract research organizations) and strategic partnerships.
Governing for success
An R&D operations ecosystem is only as good as the decisions it enables and the transparency that it provides for an organization to execute on its defined book of work, The following four components are critical to establishing an effective Governance Framework in R&D.
