Case Study

Strategic Plan Execution for a Multinational Pharmaceutical Company

Digital Transformation of the Internal Strategy Group

Industry Context: With greater and greater diversification and specialization of therapies, the increasing prevalence of low-cost generic drugs, and the emergence and rise of data-savvy, R&D-focused biotechs, even pharmaceutical juggernauts now face competition — from other pharma giants and startups alike. In order to compete in a global market greater than $1 trillion, pharmaceutical companies must get as close as they can to patient populations to better understand therapy performance, patient preferences, and ancillary services that could improve engagement.

Challenge: Developing more patient-centric, value-based strategies requires drug makers to invest in new technologies, strengthen their digital capabilities, and evolve their business models to drive omnichannel engagement with providers, payers, and patients. To do this while adapting to a constantly evolving technological, research, and regulatory landscape, the company must also optimize its operating model to execute its most strategic work as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Dynamic Deployment of Internal Resources: The company used the Catalant Platform to digitally transform how business leaders engaged the internal strategy and consulting group. This centralized team of approximately 75 high-impact employees is charged with taking on a wide variety of strategic initiatives and projects across the organization.

Business leaders can engage members of the internal strategy and consulting group through the Catalant Platform, which streamlines their access to the capabilities they need to execute their most important work.

Getting real-time visibility into both the pipeline of strategic projects and available resources enables the group’s leaders to make better-informed decisions about work prioritization and to accelerate execution, ensuring that the members of the team with the right capabilities are deployed to the right projects at the right time.

Training, Upskilling, and Enhanced Employee Value Proposition: The projects tasked to the internal strategy and consulting group often require niche skills and experiences, and dependencies between projects and initiatives often make portfolio-level staffing decisions complex puzzles to solve.

The group is a mix of high-potential junior consultants and more senior team members, so it’s also important to ensure that project teams have the requisite blend of experience.

With greater visibility into the experience, knowledge, skills, interests, and capacity within the group, business leaders are able to ensure that projects are staffed by people with the right capabilities and that junior team members are gaining exposure to projects that require them to develop new skills.

Using Catalant’s software to make more informed staffing decisions enables employees to take greater ownership of their learning and development. It also ensures that members of the group are gaining knowledge and experience that make the team more effective as a whole. This has compelled them to adopt a growth mindset and cultivate a culture of learning, as all members understand that their professional development is inextricable from executing against the company’s strategy.

Flexible Access to External Talent: Visibility into the most important work and available resources also enables the organization to better predict critical capacity gaps and to identify when projects are falling behind.  To execute initiatives and projects that require niche capabilities that may not be available within the organization, the company has flexible access to external resources through Catalant’s Expert Marketplace of more than 70,000 elite independent consultants and firms.

Tracking ROI and Business Outcomes: As with many organizations that create internal consulting groups — and use flexible models for engaging external talent — the organization sought not only to move with greater business agility in executing against its strategic plan but also to decrease its reliance on costly and inefficient engagements with global management consulting firms. Using the Catalant Platform, the company can track the impact the internal consulting group is delivering to the business to ensure they are delivering strong ROI.

By intelligently tracking both desired business outcomes and resource allocation, Catalant’s executive dashboards allow business leaders to easily track the ROI for projects and strategic initiatives, gain insights into project and portfolio performance, and inform data-driven decision making and real-time strategic planning.

About Catalant: Catalant builds software that gives companies visibility into how their work and workforce align with strategy, helps accelerate work execution through dynamic resource access, and tracks progress against key metrics to inform decision-making. More than 30% of the Fortune 100—and hundreds of other leading companies—partner with Catalant to enable effective strategy execution with greater operational clarity, increased employee productivity, and dynamic access to external resources with the right capabilities.