Executive Summary
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) can transform pharma. It can tackle the toughest challenges in life sciences and will enable entirely new ways of working in the near future. RPA is providing incredible value to pharma by easing the pain of growing compliance pressures, complaint handling, and regulatory burden. From lowering operational costs to providing new commercial and product insights, RPA is reshaping the life sciences sector altogether. For pharma, this leads to more effective treatments delivered at less cost. Success is not guaranteed. Not every implementation works out: Around a third of initial cognitive RPA deployments fail, typically due to avoidable mistakes. This paper can help you avoid such mistakes by exploring some effective approaches and best practices that have emerged, especially in some of the now well-established areas such as complaint handling. Executed correctly, automation presents a powerful tool for speeding R&D and commercialization. Some automation implementations are already freeing scientists in the lab from hundreds of hours of form-filling so they can concentrate on more creative development and discovery work. RPA can also contribute strategic insights as it achieves scale inside an organization. The more processes are automated, the more they help feed an ever-deeper pool of up-to-the-minute reports gathered by hundreds of bots across the organization. Marshaled effectively, this can yield valuable and timely business insights that offer scope for effective decision-making, continuous improvement, and optimization. It could even enable the most visionary organizations to meet their ambition to reverse or prevent the disease altogether, thanks to the power of cognitive automation. These are early days. But the combination of RPA, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML) promise improvements to processes, care outcomes, and the ability to fight disease. As automation’s cognitive abilities improve over time, it will offer new insights enabling scientists and clinicians to work in an environment in which their skills and creativity are routinely augmented by bots. The complexity and range of highly human-centric processes across any pharma firm make automation an ideal way to remodel the disparate systems and manual data entry that create costs, inefficiencies, bottlenecks, and delays. Automation streamlines and drastically speeds a range of highly repetitive, often complex but critical tasks that require high accuracy while cutting regulatory and legal risks and costs. It can be instrumental in reducing drug development timelines, helping pharma attain new levels of supply chain transparency and efficiency. Such operational improvements are not achieved via cumbersome, top-down reorganizations but on an iterative, low-risk, project-by-project basis, achieving rapid process transformation, quick ROI, and valuable learning that can be rapidly applied and improved upon in subsequent implementations.
OR Scan the QR Code
