Digital Transformation In The Pharmaceutical Industry Really Can’t Be Rushed

There's no such thing as a good time, it's just someone carrying the weight for you.

Charles Drew pioneered the blood storage system that allows blood to be preserved and reused when needed, thus providing the possibility of survival for many people who need blood transfusions, whether due to illness or accident; Alfred Alberts found lovastatin, which effectively inhibits cholesterol synthesis, and made a great contribution to the treatment of hypercholesterolaemia and mixed hyperlipidaemia.

As a result, the development of the pharmaceutical industry has always received great attention because of its relevance to human life and health.

In the international market, Pfizer has partnered with IBM WatsonHealth and Crystal Technology, and Novartis has partnered with Medidata and Cota Healthcare, all of which undoubtedly prove that pharmaceutical companies are actively using digital technology or tools to innovate and develop themselves.

In China, especially in the last two years, the pharmaceutical industry is moving towards improving the quality of life by shifting from medical services to health services, creating a parallel pattern of health management and medical treatment, influenced by medical reform policies and high technology.

As a result, companies are taking the initiative to explore management transformation and technology transformation, both of which need to be supported by digital transformation first.

The "urgency" of digital transformation in the pharmaceutical industry

External "urgency": medical reform policy brings huge challenges for pharmaceutical companies

With the advancement of medical reform policies in China's healthcare industry, such as the "two-ticket system" released by the state in early 2017 and implemented nationwide, the graded diagnosis and treatment system that is gradually being implemented, as well as the increasing efforts to control the drug-to-consumption ratio in recent years, pharmaceutical manufacturers have been presented with huge challenges.

The most fundamental impact of the two-ticket system on the medical industry lies in the reshaping of the industry's order, with the "ticketing system" enhancing the control of the terminal destination of drugs and medical devices in a trinity way, "leaving traces of the whole process under control", while cooperating with the direction of medical insurance payment and market access. A forward-looking reform programme.

The graded treatment system breaks down the boundaries of medical institutions, grading them according to the priority of diseases and the ease of treatment, with medical institutions at different levels taking on the treatment of different diseases and gradually realizing the medical process from general practice to specialization.

If the national call for all public hospitals to reduce the proportion of drugs to less than 30%, for pharmaceutical companies to compress the market, then the two-ticket system and graded diagnosis and treatment of pharmaceutical companies will have a greater impact, the internal division of the industry will further intensify.

All this means that the original ecosystem of the industry will be reconstructed, the operation process of each enterprise will be changed, and the digitalization of pharmaceutical enterprises will be further strengthened.

Some companies choose to integrate the upstream and downstream industry chains and the layout of the whole industry chain in the Chinese market to enhance their competitiveness; others choose to take the route of boutique projects for development.

Liu Qian, Vice President of Huaren Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd, believes that this policy change is not only a challenge, but also a good opportunity. This is conducive to the implementation of the national strategy of excellence, raising the threshold of access and management standards for the entire medical industry, transforming medical services into health services, developing a large health industry, and the ultimate goal of reducing the proportion of drugs is to control the occurrence of diseases, that is, to strengthen the early screening, prevention, delay and other links, and develop a pattern of health management and medical treatment at the same time.

Therefore, this is our opportunity to make use of this opportunity for digital transformation to restructure the industry and better compete with domestic and international manufacturers, so as to achieve a bend in the road.

Therefore, Hualin's development strategy is to build an ecosystem for end hospitals and end patients, to help establish an open, interconnected, shared and collaborative platform between medical institutions and patients, to provide a comprehensive solution for a certain type of patient, to integrate resources of all dimensions around the same patient group, and to promote the development of the whole industry to a deeper field.

But the first step to achieve this goal is digital transformation, otherwise it is impossible to achieve cross-territory, cross-discipline, cross-user group, cross-organizational synergy and collaboration, a comprehensive digital upgrade and transformation is imminent.

Internal "urgency": the change in the development model of pharmaceutical companies brought about by the downscaling.

"The term "dimensional reduction" comes from the science fiction novel "Three Bodies" by Chinese science fiction writer Liu Cixin.

What is a descending strike?

In the novel "Three Bodies", the civilisation of Earth eventually dies from an advanced alien civilisation called the Singers, who use a weapon called a two-way foil. This weapon forces the solar system, including the Earth, from three dimensions to two, which is known as a downgrade strike.

The purpose of a descending strike is to forcibly reduce the dimensionality of the space in which the target is attacked so that the target cannot survive in the lower dimensions and thus destroy the target.

As an example, the blow to the traditional retail industry by e-commerce is a typical downscaling blow. The development of Internet-based e-commerce brings high efficiency and excellent experience through the integration of information flow, capital flow and logistics, making the traditional retail industry with outdated technology and models almost powerless.

With the growing development of the Internet and technology, this kind of downgrade is becoming more and more common.

As it is now, the Internet is disrupting the entire pharmaceutical industry, creating new business structures, profit models, etc. that require data to support, for example, electronic case sharing, image sharing, sharing of testing facilities and telemedicine.

For example, the aggregation of patient clinical records and health insurance data sets for advanced analysis to improve the decision-making capabilities of healthcare payers, healthcare providers and pharmaceutical companies; the aggregation of pharmaceutical sales data, including daily sales management data, internal sales and financial data, physician customer data, patient history data, etc., to achieve precise marketing of drugs, while obtaining timely consumer feedback, etc.

The pharmaceutical industry is a special industry, with a complex and large number of customers, innovative pharmaceutical products and services, and a complex operation model determined by the characteristics of the pharmaceutical industry itself, all determine the value of data.

In this regard, Liu Qian of Huaren Pharmaceuticals believes that in the era of big data and health, as a pharmaceutical company, the secret to longevity is to build its own digital management system while seizing opportunities and resources to do well in business, and to consolidate its internal strength.

Industrial development has enabled pharmaceutical companies to achieve the expected productivity gains, and the development of big data will certainly bring a new round of changes and upgrades for pharmaceutical companies.

But the digital transformation of the pharmaceutical industry must not be rushed.

"The best “for you is the one that suits you

"The secret of the information construction of Huaren Pharmaceuticals is that it is fetishistic, based on me, compatible, integrated and absorbed, and eventually turned into a tool that we can master on our own", said Liu Qian.

Liu Qian is the vice president of Huaren Pharmaceuticals, in charge of all aspects including information technology and innovation.

"After I came to Huaren, production, sales, procurement, warehousing, finance, audit, risk control, every department came to me for information technology tools, they want data, real-time data. Almost all of our data today is static data, what do we want? Real-time data that can monitor every minute and every second of the enterprise. Data first, so that information technology throughout the enterprise, all departments need the support of information technology", said Liu Qian.

But the digital transformation of any enterprise is never easy, it must be full of difficult choices at the beginning and the process is not without painful trials and tribulations.

Therefore, Liu Qian was not too picky about the tools at the beginning, but adhered to the fetishism of absorbing the successful experience of others first, mainly by learning from them. But this fetishism is never about adapting to tools, but rather the process of selecting tools and developing tools to integrate them.

So look back on the digital transformation of Huaren Pharmaceuticals can be found, they have also used a lot of public platform vendors in the early days, through the purchase or lease of a large number of ways to figure out, the process is not easy, suitable for their own is the best.

The concept of "anything I can't absorb and master is not mine" has accompanied the entire digital transformation process of Huaren Pharmaceuticals, and Liu Qian calls this concept "me-oriented".

The entire digital architecture of Huaren Pharmaceuticals has taken shape, and is roughly divided into the manufacturing segment, the innovation segment (commercial and retail segment) and the medical services segment.

The innovation of Huaren is to integrate the systems chosen for each module through the process engine on the intermediate collaboration system (Zhiyuan Internet Collaboration Platform), and to complete the configuration of the process and the integration of data.

For example, when an employee in the manufacturing section initiates a purchase request for ingredients, the person who approves the request can do so based on the number of remaining ingredients (the basis for approval), unlike the original process which required reporting and approval at different levels and reduced efficiency.

Moreover, through the system configuration, the data of Zhiyuan Collaboration System and other business systems can be connected, and finally all the data can be centralized in the Collaboration System and organized and analyzed into data reports, which is conducive to the inspection of the enterprise's own operation status and so on, and provides support for the management's decision making.

The most important thing is that, during the follow-up process, Huaren Pharmaceuticals found that the biggest advantage of the unified and integrated platform is that it is easy for industry chain partners to join, which facilitates the construction of the industry chain ecology, the sharing of data within and outside the industry chain and upstream and downstream, and the improvement of the competitiveness of the whole chain, which is in line with Huaren's development strategy of building the industry chain ecosphere.

The eco-system of Huaren Pharmaceuticals is built around the "ultimate service target", and Liu Qian believes that pharmaceutical companies should realize that the ultimate service target is not the hospital, but the patient. Only by creating value around the patient, the ultimate service recipient, can they win the market and win.

For example, through the establishment of a cross-regional, cross-discipline, cross-user group, cross-organizational platform, Huaren Pharmaceuticals records the daily dialysis status of patients with kidney failure, the various data of the body, etc., and at the same time, according to these data to determine whether the patient has the onset of peritonitis and other conditions, to provide real services for patients, and these are the credit of Huaren Pharmaceuticals digital.

"The right tool and the right method to get twice the result with half the effort

Liu Qian believes that digital transformation must be a sharp tool for enterprise transformation, since it is a sharp tool, it is a double-edged sword, you need to know its blade point, the sword tool hurt. A suitable tool and the correct means of application are crucial for enterprises to achieve digital transformation.

The overall digital deployment of Hualin Pharmaceuticals is built through the ECEP system in the front office, the collaboration platform system in the middle office and the manufacturing (ERP) system in the back office.

Specifically, the ECEP system in the front office and the ERP system in the back office are integrated in the middle office, and the processes are deployed, while the ERP financial systems and EC systems distributed in each office are configured to facilitate the flow of data to help the company and managers make better decisions.

The front-end ECEP system is developed by Huaren Pharmaceuticals itself; for the back-end manufacturing system, Huaren Pharmaceuticals chose SAP's ERP system, which has advantages in the supply system of multiple factories, warehousing and manufacturing control; and in the most important part of the information construction, Huaren Pharmaceuticals chose Zhiyuan Internet, which has a deeper understanding of the concept of collaboration and a more mature ability to build collaborative systems.

Liu Qian said that the reason for choosing Zhiyuan Collaboration Platform is that it not only plays an important role within Huaren Pharmaceuticals, but also serves as an incubator to open up the upstream and downstream industrial chains of Huaren Pharmaceuticals, incubating intra-organizational or cross-organizational collaboration. Therefore, the Zhiyuan Collaboration Platform plays a pivotal role for Hualin Pharmaceuticals to complete its strategic deployment and innovation of the entire ecosystem.

Huaren Pharmaceuticals uses the collaboration platform to share financial and other information, and then to build up the entire organization, including the establishment of the company's system, budget approval, flow of official documents, project carry-over, budget, personnel, recruitment and so on, and then to achieve various aspects of control through the collaboration system, including budget control, production and sales balance, quality control, the special management perspective of pharmaceutical enterprises from GMP to sales. The GSP process is a series of controls and so on.

At the same time, Liu Qian's information technology deployment method is also worthy of reference, as it has deployed the mobile Zhiyuan M3 in the public cloud, but localized the instant messaging Zhixin and ECEP platform.

The cloud deployment of Zhiyuan M3 was based on the consideration of multiple divisions and offices of Huaren Pharmaceuticals, in order to solve the problem of "North Unicom and South Telecom" and to allow all departments of the enterprise to use a unified system for office work.

For the local deployment of the letter, Liu Qian said: "Of course, the deployment strategy is very important, including the deployment of the letter. Let's say our letters are deployed locally rather than in the cloud, because we have a lot of discussion groups, and the discussions are all business secrets, and the idea is not to be stolen.

But we don't use WeChat either, because WeChat is a tablet, and Zhixin is organised. We have the security of managing work groups and communicating in an organised way, whereas WeChat has the feature of fast communication, but you find that when someone suddenly leaves, they are still in the group and can copy everything in the group. "

As it turns out, Liu Qian's choice wasn't wrong.

The processes built through the collaboration platform have improved the efficiency of the company's staff in dealing with business, and the standardised processes have allowed the business and achievements to be managed effectively. The cross-organisational collaboration that has been incubated not only helps the multi-divisional Huaren Pharmaceuticals to achieve full collaboration within the company, but also provides a guarantee for Huaren Pharmaceuticals to build its own ecosystem.

In addition, "In the digital transformation, enterprises should not pursue the high and mighty, the underlying foundation determines the superstructure, it is most important to be down-to-earth." Liu Qian stressed.

Therefore, from the beginning of the digital transformation of Huaren Pharmaceuticals to date, has been adhering to their own and down-to-earth step by step, although the process is still very long, but they firmly believe that step by step to lay a good foundation, will certainly usher in a more permanent future.

To all CIOs troubled by digital transformation: a journey without end

In the process of Huaren Pharmaceuticals' digital exploration, we can see Liu Qian's figure gradually come to life.

Liu Qian said: "CIO must serve the enterprise strategy, he is the CEO important staff, or even chief of staff, he has to understand how to use each kind of weapon, the effect of each kind of weapon, the ability to deploy, the ability to cover the battlefield, the role of each of his soldiers, the role of each team, so I think today is such, we say called the battlefield dare to set the gas, to the CEO to make quick decisions."

As emerging technologies and market forces continue to create new disruptions for businesses, digital transformation may be a journey with no end in sight, and it won't reach a certain stage when it's 'done'. The end of one phase is usually the beginning of the next, and companies must constantly adapt to new changes in order to survive.