Case Study: Data Engineering
Client: Leading Pharmaceutical Company (LPC)
Location: Richmond, VA
Challenge:
LPC fights life-threatening medical conditions by inventing, manufacturing, marketing, and selling life-saving drugs. It’s important work that requires a lot of data to do well. Regular questions include:
- How much of a drug needs to be produced at a given time?
- How do we know how much of a drug is already in stock?
- How can we effectively bring that product to market, when FDA policy limits our ability to reach out to patients directly?
- How do we understand which physicians are interested in prescribing our drug for their clients?
- How do we price our drug correctly?
To answer these questions, LPC was tracking its own inventory and sales as well as contracting with a pharmaceutical data provide to gain access to large quantities of data about its product’s prescription and usage. But making sense of these disparate data sets wasn’t as easy as it first seemed. How could LPC process these data sets to create a data resource that could be quickly and easily used by employees to increase pharmaceutical sales?
RTS Labs Solution:
Working closely with the LPC data team, RTS Labs used a variety of data tools to synthesize and process LPC’s operational and aggregate data to create a picture of where certain drugs were most in demand—a picture that could be refined from the County level all the way down to a specific doctor’s office. By linking demand, sales, and inventory data in real-time, RTS Labs enabled LPC staff to see the reciprocal relationship between these three data sets and to ramp up or ramp down pharmaceutical production accordingly. RTS Labs was also able to provide LPC leadership with an impressively accurate forecast of where demand would occur over the course of the upcoming year.
The Result:
RTS Labs significantly reduced the amount of time and resources LPC was spending on its data management. The new data platform and reporting solution also impacted LPC’s bottom line by enabling LPC staff to have a better grasp on how much of a given product was in demand across the country in real-time while simultaneously providing projections of future demand. Consequently, LPC leadership knew how many sales staff and how much of a given drug were needed both today and tomorrow, and the business was able to cost-effectively expand into new markets while offering even better products and services to customers.
RTS Labs’ solution helped LPC achieve:
- 19% increase in market share
- 70% reduction in data onboarding
- Lower data infrastructure costs
- More accurate forecasting models