Can you elaborate on the challenges biopharma companies face when it comes to their go-to-market strategies and how integrated software, data, and services can help overcome these obstacles?

As science gets more advanced and with increased pressure from governments on rising healthcare costs, companies are aiming for high quality engagement, innovating their content, customer service and implementing a precision-based engagement model. Veeva’s industry cloud solutions provide software, data, and services to support the most critical functions of a life sciences organization, from R&D through commercial. 

Our ecosystem of solutions brings together software, data, and consulting services for successful commercial execution on a unified platform, driving efficiency and productivity in areas where ways of working are traditionally siloed and fragmented. 

We enable customers to drive excellence in their commercial execution with the goal of helping our customers have the right data and tools to execute in the new commercial go-to-market (GTM) model. Our offerings also help build internal capabilities in digital, data and analytics to support go-to-market precision and educate doctors on new therapies in a way that prioritizes the 360-view of the customer.

Could you provide insights into the varying needs of different players in the life sciences industry, from small biotech startups to large multinational corporations? How does Veeva tailor its solutions to accommodate this diversity?

While the needs of a life sciences organization may differ depending on its size, there are several parallel core competencies regardless of whether the company is a multinational corporation or a small biotech startup. Such competencies include planning, engagement with Healthcare Professionals (HCPs), coordination between sales, medical and marketing teams, design of tailored content and optimizing ways of working to maximize productivity and efficiency.

Veeva is building the industry cloud for life sciences, with the goal of making the industry more efficient & effective. We want to be essential to and appreciated by every company in the life sciences industry, large and small. 

Our industry cloud comprises two areas, Development Cloud and Commercial Cloud:

• Development Cloud is the operating system for product development. These are software products spanning Clinical trials, Manufacturing, Quality processes.
• Commercial Cloud is the foundation for commercial excellence- it includes software, data & services. 

Our solutions are developed with the end goal of supporting the critical functions of the life sciences industry, so that companies of all sizes, from smaller biotechs to larger pharmaceutical organizations, can bring products to market faster, safer, and more efficiently. Since Veeva applications are modular, customers can start with one application area and add more solutions as they grow, with our solutions tailored to suit their needs as they scale up.

In the era of digital transformation, cybersecurity is a significant concern. How does Veeva address the growing risks and ensure the protection of customer and patient data within the context of integrated software and services for biopharma companies? (customer data only)

Veeva uses cloud technology that follows the highest industry standard best practices. We regularly review and modify our security program to reflect changing technology, regulations, laws, risk, industry and security practices and other business needs.

Our solutions are designed to avoid single points of failure to reduce the chance of business disruption. We maintain formally documented recovery processes that may be activated in the event of a significant business disruption for both our corporate IT infrastructure and the production infrastructure that processes our customer data. We conduct testing, at least annually, to verify the validity of the recovery processes.

We also implement various disaster recovery measures to minimize data loss in the event of a single data center disaster. We architect our solutions using redundant configurations to minimize service interruptions and continually monitor our solutions for any sign of failure or pending failure, and we take preemptive action to attempt to minimize or prevent downtime.

Could you discuss some of the common concerns and considerations that companies need to keep in mind while implementing integrated solutions for optimizing processes across both commercial and R&D aspects?

The pharma industry for years has had applications which operate in silos.  The need for R&D productivity and efficiency in a highly competitive market is now driving the need for an unified and efficient system.

There are significant considerations involved in the migration from an existing proprietary or legacy system to a newer, more optimized system hosted on cloud. Rather than thinking of this as a “replacement” of older systems, many organizations should consider the adoption of newer processes as a forward-looking mindset of business optimization. The clarity of a company’s vision and its ability to drive change across the organization for employees are some significant drivers when it comes to implementing an industry cloud solution.  

Therefore, choosing the right vendor who can support an organization through data migration, the adoption of new systems and change management while bringing about next generation capabilities are critical evaluation factors that should be considered at length. 

Innovation and product development are crucial for the biopharma industry. Could you shed light on the challenges companies face in innovating and bringing their products to market efficiently? How does Veeva's integrated approach contribute to overcoming these challenges?

Life sciences organizations are always finding new ways to innovate and accelerate the time to bring drugs to market. From conducting clinical trials to the sharing and analysis of data across different internal functions and submission, there are many points in the R&D life cycle where there are opportunities for greater efficiencies and agile processes  

Veeva’s solutions aim to eliminate data and processing siloes across clinical, quality, regulatory and safety, while ensuring that our customers can deliver commercial excellence when their products hit the market. 

One such solution is Veeva Vault EDC. As clinical trials become more complex, remote and diverse, existing EDC systems are vulnerable in the face of change, and often require frequent and inconvenient downtimes and highly manual tasks in order to share data and make protocol amendments. 

Veeva Vault EDC provides an end-to-end environment to collect, review and process trial data about patients, enabling efficient study builds and collecting all patient form and lab data and medical coding which enables users to get cleaner data with less effort. This therefore significantly improves study execution time, increasing speed to market and achieving significant savings in cost and effort for research sites. 

Can you provide specific examples of success stories where Veeva's solutions have significantly improved the operational efficiency and effectiveness of biopharma companies in the APAC region?

We have longstanding partnerships with customers across the globe, who leverage Veeva’s solutions across both Commercial and R&D. 18 of the top 20 biopharma companies in Asia Pacific use Veeva CRM, our lead solution in our Commercial suite of solutions. 

Some examples include where we have significantly and positively impacted out customers’ operational efficiency and effectiveness include:

• The use of Veeva Align to accelerate processes and launch a new product for one of our customers within 5 days. Traditionally a laborious process, deploying a new product launch to field teams often involve time consuming steps such as setting up the territory for launch, enabling engagement plans and making it collaborative with field teams. This process can take up to months, but we successfully shortened this period for our customers. 
• With Veeva PromoMats one of our customers was able to review, approve and complete the delivery of more than 10,000 annual promotional materials in 20 days from an original lead time of 60 days. 
• Veeva’s Vault Clinical Data Management Suite helped a customer reduce complexity within its operations, consolidating 20 distinct applications into one scalable platform, allowing them to reduce the cycle time for the development of first-to-market products by a year.