Using digital asset management to improve efficiency in commercial life sciences

 

By Jason Sundberg, Senior Director, Commercial Content Strategy, Veeva Systems

 

In the first of a two-part series, Veeva Systems discusses two strategies to speed development of commercial content and improve compliance in life sciences. Read how Shire increased its efficiency and effectiveness with digital asset management. In June, learn how Merck built off of its digital asset management foundation to implement a successful modular content strategy.

Digital is changing the relationship between the life sciences industry and their stakeholders, making it faster and easier for companies to provide personalized content that meets the needs of individual healthcare professionals, key opinion leaders, and even patients.

Traditionally, life sciences companies have taken a centralized approach to content, in which entire assets (such as a brochure or an article) are created and approved centrally, and then distributed to every country. While this meets the need for brand consistency and compliance, this traditional process can be slow, expensive, and disconnected from individual market needs.

As the volume of content continues to increase, speed is of the essence, and a “one size fits all” approach is simply no longer good enough. Adopting a flexible digital asset management approach to content and breaking it into components can make content creation simpler and more efficient. In this way, life sciences companies can develop content faster and that is tailored to a healthcare professional’s (HCP’s) preferred channel for more effective engagement.

Powering the digital supply chain

A successful digital content strategy must meet three crucial needs: simplify the process, reduce cost, and ensure compliance while enabling localization. Start by breaking down content into small components – such as an image or product claim – and making these available through a single, cloud-based digital asset management system, life sciences companies can balance compliance, localization, and speed.

When creating campaigns, local brand managers can simply assemble their specific content to meet their market needs. Stored content is therefore consistent with brand values and approved at corporate level, requiring minimal local review to ensure compliance. The result is that more compelling, personalized content is delivered to market more quickly, saving time and driving greater engagement.

Across the life sciences industry, companies must often withdraw content after it has been published, causing a major headache for those using traditional processes. Global digital asset management makes this simpler to meet compliance requirements. If specific pieces of information need to be withdrawn, this can be achieved quickly and simply, across every property and channel. Companies don’t need to withdraw whole pieces – just replace individual components as required.

Here are three ways digital asset management simplifies the process, reduces cost, and helps ensure compliance.

1. Making the process simple and seamless

Currently the process of creating and sharing digital content is both complex and time-consuming. Content is created and assembled manually into different formats, which involves multiple authors and medical, legal, review teams to check that every claim can be satisfactorily substantiated.

Often these groups, individuals, and agencies use a range of different systems, which can lead to disconnected processes, duplication, complex approvals, and regional silos of information.

Digital asset management allows life sciences companies to cut through the complexity. A unified, cloud-based digital asset management solution that stores components and content pieces in a single location enables process simplification, giving teams fast access to approved content whenever they need it.

2. Reducing the overall cost of content

Complexity adds to cost and time. This is a growing issue in the digital age, when speed to market is crucial and the volume of content is continually increasing. Replacing a mix of systems and processes with a single, seamless digital asset management solution reduces complexity, saving cost and time. Content can be bulk published, updated, or withdrawn wherever it appears. This approach reduces the need for expensive reworking of minor details, removing bureaucracy and enabling teams to focus on content rather than administration.

Another cost-saving advantage of digital asset management is that now the company, not the agency, owns content assets so it can change agencies as needed without financial penalty or loss of content. For example, if a life sciences company decides to change, add, or remove an agency, it retains the content source file and saves the expense of paying the agency to recreate it.

3. Balancing compliance and localization

While compliance is vital in the life sciences sector, ensuring it can often come at the expense of speed or the ability to localize content for specific country needs. Traditionally, a small number of pieces of content are created, translated as necessary, and approved before being provided to each country. This ensures compliance and provides an audit trail to show where content has been distributed, but limits effectiveness. Audiences in every country have different needs and expectations when it comes to content. This means that creating a single article centrally and expecting it to resonate equally well around the world is unlikely to work.

Translation is an obvious change, but localization needs to go much further if it is to be personalized and relevant, while remaining compliant and consistent with overall product messaging.

Reaping the benefits of digital asset management

While efficiency and compliance are key reasons to move to a single digital asset management solution, the benefits go much further than cost and time savings. With all content in one place, life sciences companies can track the usage of content and gain much deeper insight into its efficacy. They can see which assets are being used most frequently, which channels are most effective, and even which modules within specific assets are resonating most with different audiences.

Shire has halved the 1,500 agencies it uses globally by implementing a unified digital asset management solution. The company has also reduced local content approval time by 60 percent. All content, from press releases to multimedia assets, is now available through a single, global system.

Shire approves all forms of content centrally and puts them into electronic folders for each country through a brand portal. This ensures that the content produced by agencies on Shire’s preferred supplier list is controlled by the company’s compliance function and preapproved, ready for use in each country. It gives local managers a “one-stop shop” for content that they can download and combine quickly and easily. This reduces cost and bureaucracy while improving quality.

“If you’re the marketer, where do you want to go for the most up-to-date information? Bang, there it is. You want the latest press release? That’s where it is,” says Ian Hale, Shire’s senior executive for global advertising and promotion. “It’s like having a tray of goodies that you’ve got, preapproved in your country.”

As the industry shifts, this is a significant opportunity for life sciences companies to break down the silos between marketing and sales, and enable greater, more data-driven collaboration. Digital content offers unparalleled opportunities for life sciences companies to engage more intelligently with their audiences on a personal level, through their channels of choice. However, the sheer volume of content required across multiple formats threatens to overwhelm traditional, centralized strategies.

By using digital asset management to create, distribute, and personalize digital content, life sciences companies like Shire can balance compliance with local needs, while cutting time to market and boosting efficiency.