The multi-million dollar agreement comes on the tail of a series of other outsourcing deals by the drug major, which is turning to contract service providers and offshoring to reduce costs and improve efficiencies across the organisation.
In recent months AstraZeneca has signed a five-year deal with Cognizant for IT maintenance services, a three-year deal with WuXi Pharmatech for high-throughput screening services, and a five-year agreement with Cognizant in the area of clinical data management.
The Infosys deal is “part of AstraZeneca's transformation initiative to accelerate innovation and bring products to market faster,” said the drugmaker in a statement.
For many pharmaceutical companies one of the key objectives of this kind of an agreement is to provide visibility on costs, and this deal is no different.
Infosys uses a global shared-services model with a fixed price for outcome-based deliverables, as well as unit pricing for managing changes in the base scope of the engagement. AZ believes that will help it achieve “greater operational flexibility, lower risk and better spend control.”
Richard Williams, AstraZeneca’s chief information officer, said: “Infosys' ability to deliver a flexible operating model [will] address our changing business needs more efficiently."
The company hopes to benefit from improved use of its assets, a shift to standardised business processes, consistent service quality and a predicable cost structure.
AstraZeneca will start implementing the new arrangement in the UK and Nordic countries, subsequently rolling it out in the US, continental Europe, Latin America and Asia. Some AstraZeneca employees in Sweden and the UK will be ‘rebadged’ to Infosys, it said.
The drugmaker said last year that it would expand the purchase of semi-manufactured medicines and the external manufacturing of active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) over the coming five to 10 years, as well as certain drug discovery and development functions and commercial operations.