Lilly chooses Cognizant to deliver commercial operations
Using its ‘Business Process as a Service (BPaaS)’ model, Cognizant will offer Lilly various services including commercial analytics, sales force planning, sales incentive compensation, customer relationship management, business reporting and data warehousing and state compliance reporting.
US-based Cognizant said it will combine cloud-based IT infrastructure, its own proprietary software applications and other intellectual property for commercial operations in life sciences with its knowledge of business process outsourcing (BPO).
Cost-effective and flexible
Under the deal, Cognizant said Lilly will switch from a high cost, capital-intensive model to a variable, consumption-based cost structure, allowing the drug major greater flexibility to meet ever changing sales and marketing needs.
Nagaraja Srivatsan, Cognizant senior vp and head of life sciences, said: “We are committed to helping Lilly USA transform its commercial operations, providing a broad portfolio of integrated services to ensure business agility, continuous improvement, and the most innovative approaches.
“At a time of enormous regulatory and economic pressures in the life sciences industry, our BPaas approach will help Lilly reduce risk, have the flexibility to rapidly scale down, and be highly responsive to market demands,” he added.
BPaaS major category of cloud IT
Market strategy consulting and subscription research services group, Saugertuck Technologies said BPaaS is fast emerging as the next major category of cloud IT.
Cloud computing infrastructures generally consists of services delivered through a web browser and stored on servers, while BPaas is a term which covers a wide range of Cloud enabled innovation within the services marketplace.
David Ricks, president of Lilly USA, said: “By collaborating with the industry leader in commercial operations service delivery, we will sharpen our own focus on understanding and exceeding our customers’ needs – the path forward to delivering business results in our increasingly challenging environment.”
Ricks believes Lilly’s deal with Cognizant marks “another step in [Lilly’s] mission to become the most customer-focused pharmaceutical company in the US market.”
Acquisition of MarketRX
Cognizant began offering cloud-based services to meet industry-specific requirements after it acquired New-Jersey-based MarketRX in 2007 for $135m (€99.5m). MarketRX provided analytics and web-based software services to life sciences firms in the pharma, biotech and medical devices markets.
