As the pharma industry is driven by innovation, it also faces unique challenges from pricing to patenting, and developing new products with the evolving patient needs. Besides, external challenges – including pressure to meet regulatory standards and ensure compliance, add layers to its complexity.

By implementing Business Intelligence tools for pharma data analytics such as Power BI for pharma, the industry can ride on the wave of digitization and smoothly navigate through these challenges.

Data plays a non-negotiable part throughout a pharmaceutical company’s value chain – from discovering drugs to developing them and getting them to the market.

There is a massive potential in the large amount of data a pharma company generates from different sources – including clinical trials, research and development, manufacturing operations, sales & marketing and supply chain. Without the right technologies and tools to manage this raw data, its potential could be wasted.

However, data analytics and visualization tools like Microsoft Power BI for pharmaceutical industry can streamline all stages of their operations.

Let’s explore in this article how Power BI for pharma can help companies utilize their data most efficiently and accelerate growth.

HOW POWER BI HELPS THE PHARMA INDUSTRY IN VARIOUS FUNCTIONS

DRUG DEVELOPMENT

Drug manufacturing companies heavily rely on patient data, medical publications, and industry updates while developing a new medicine. With Microsoft Power BI, pharma companies can organize all this data and share it in real-time, thereby increasing collaboration in the development team and streamlining the process of developing new drugs.

CLINICAL TRIALS

Every phase of a clinical trial at a pharma company is a costly and time-consuming process. Tracing and accurately analyzing the complex data generated during every aspect of the clinical trial is critical.

Power BI pulls data from different databases and spreadsheets and centralizes it in one place.

The clinical research, statistics, and regulatory teams can share interactive graphs and charts from Power BI across different teams and focus on the most significant metrics for the trials.

Furthermore, real-time sharing of the advanced analytics from Power BI can help the researchers identify any issues and predict potential outcomes to improve the performance of the trial.

Ultimately, informed decision-making with transparency in data improves efficiency and patient outcomes.

MANUFACTURING AND PACKAGING

During the production and packaging of medicines, there are many specific, well-defined targets called KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) in a pharma company that the manufacturing team must meet.

These could be equipment performance, labelling and packaging guidelines, and many more.

With dashboards from power tools, the operations team can easily view and track these KPIs in graphs and pictures, and quickly decide the course of action.

SUPPLY CHAIN

Recent times and the COVID pandemic have highlighted the importance of an on-point supply chain process in delivering medicines.

Power BI and pharma data analytics can aid organizations to improve supply chain and logistics efficiency by making use of their valuable data in ways such as:

1. Optimizing storage and shipping of perishable drugs through real-time access to accurate Inventory data
2. Tracking delivery schedules of medicines
3. Identifying and promptly addressing disruptions and delays in shipment
4. Improving demand forecasting
5. Lowering costs and increasing labour productivity

COMPLIANCE

There are numerous laws and regulations that the pharmaceutical companies need to follow. These regulations significantly impact the timeline for a pharma company to release a drug to market.

With Power BI dashboards for pharma industry, the compliance team can share the data across borders and teams in an easily understandable visual format, highlighting any gaps in regulations early – hence avoiding losses and legal troubles. Not only this, Power BI can also help large organizations manage their finance compliance processes.

SALES & MARKETING

Power BI software can analyze and derive insights from all the sales & marketing data in a pharma company – from market research to pricing, from evaluating how effective marketing campaigns are to measuring the sales performance of different products. The sales and marketing teams can use these insights to increase their market share and revenues.

CONCLUSION

We can see how the pharmaceutical industry can harness the potential of data to serve its unique needs and improve business performance with business intelligence tools like Power BI.

The ease of representing complex data in beautiful dashboards makes Power BI an effective tool that pharma companies can use for better decision-making and improving business performance. Further, with increased collaboration with real-time insights and accurate data forecasting, Power BI can give a significant boost to functions ranging from supply chain and marketing to compliance in the pharmaceutical industry.

Have you encountered any specific challenges or roadblocks in utilizing your valuable data for your pharmaceutical company? What data analytical solutions are you seeking to streamline all your pharma functions?

Share your thoughts with us, we’d love to hear from you. If you have any questions or would like to know more about our Power BI consulting services, please feel free to contact us.