Life Sciences
Solution Brief
Brief
Solution
Business Impact
Challenges
Using SAS during launch sequence
planning, a global life sciences
company was able to generate
more than $100 million of additional
revenue through a global coordinated
response to international reference
pricing.
•Lack of country price governance. Without
a centralized framework for launch strategy
management, pricing decisions will be
reactive, poorly targeted and fail to support
corporate strategic goals.
•Slow time to results. Most solutions take
too long to run all your scenarios, which
delays results and consumes valuable
resources.
•Absence of advanced analytics. Basic
processes and tools can’t optimize launch
revenues while navigating the complexities
of international reference pricing.
•Lack of global vision. Pricing and launch
sequencing decisions at the country level are
sometimes made without considering how
external reference pricing may affect global
revenue.
Use optimized launch sequence strategies
to maximize global revenue
The Issue
Our Approach
Product pipeline pressures and revenue loss to generics after patent
expiration are escalating the need to maximize revenue from new
product launches. That means balancing speed to market against
complex country pricing mandates and trade interdependencies. Your
financial performance will depend on successfully managing international go-to-market strategies. Determining optimal pricing and launch
sequences for all the countries in your sales plan is crucial. But pricing
challenges don’t end there.
Using SAS® for launch revenue optimization means you can
proactively simulate and optimize launch timing and pricing decisions
based on their predicted effect on global revenue. SAS delivers
software and services via the cloud to help:
International regulatory agencies use a host of methods to limit the
prices you can charge during a launch. A widespread practice is to
apply International Reference Pricing (IRP) rules. The impact of IRP is
price erosion.
• Assess the impact of specific pricing decisions, reference pricing
and mandates – by country and globally – on revenue and profitability using what-if modeling, in-market revenue simulations, optimization modeling, etc. to quickly run multiple scenarios to identify
the best actions for optimizing launch pricing and sequencing.
The IRP rules bring a new complexity to determining the optimal
launch sequence. Launching a product at a lower price in highly referenced countries that are connected to other countries can create an
irreversible global price erosion.
• Maximize revenue for the entire company rather than individual
markets or regions by using data visualization, prebuilt dashboards
and reporting capabilities to share launch sequence and pricing
insights to decision makers in their preferred formats.
Some companies have taken steps to formalize the launch sequence
process. However the level of analytical modeling investment and difficulties related to computational complexity have deterred progress in
this field.
A successful global pricing strategy will enable you to negotiate the
best possible launch prices across all markets and carefully stagger
launch times to help avoid external reference pricing impacts.
• Easily integrate all of your core data associated with a global
launch – such as country reference baskets and rules, earliest
launch dates, expected reimbursement and predicted volume
forecast – in an easy-to-use, intuitive interface.
The SAS® Difference: Global pricing optimization
Case Study: A global pharmaceutical company.
Using SAS for launch revenue optimization allows you to assess
market dynamics and deploy advanced analytics for market access
and global pricing. No other solution delivers the complete range
of analytics necessary to optimize launch prices and sequence,
analyze and apply insights, as well as predict future demand. Only
SAS provides:
Situation
• Faster and more accurate simulation and optimization scenarios.
Our approach for determining the optimal launch sequence,
based on mixed integer linear programming techniques, is unique
in the industry. You will have the most accurate and fastest
modeling engine on the market to determine your launch
sequence.
• Dashboards and easy visualization. Prebuilt dashboards provide
quick insights at the country and global level to easily understand
optimization recommendations. SAS provides a reference network
diagram to understand all of the connections that exist between
countries. Easy-to-use visualization and reporting means lessskilled users will be able to quickly visualize information and
create, interact and share reports.
Now pricing experts can focus on modeling launch strategies and be
up and running quickly in our simplified, cloud-based environment.
In preparation for a global new product launch, the company was
searching for a way to optimize launch prices to increase corporate
revenue. In particular, it was looking for country-level revenue optimization that would take into consideration all market share drivers, as well
as government pricing and interdependency rules.
Solution
SAS delivered optimization capabilities that enabled the company to:
• Model optimal launch price and sequence across 50 countries
and 60 months – in less than five minutes.
• Gain insights into in-market price changes and impacts across
the globe.
Results
• An optimized launch for a new product projected a 2.7 percent
increase in global revenue during the 60-month base plan.
• At the end of the launch sequence, the average global price
was 4 percent higher compared to the base plan.
• The pricing group has a secure, centralized repository for country
pricing and forecasting data, reference rules and third-party data.
What if you could …
Access all pricing data
Perform trade-off analysis
Maximize global revenue
What if your global pricing
group could quickly generate
the best scenario to maximize
revenues for a new product
during the critical launch
period?
What if you could compare
various launch sequences
and in-market scenarios to
estimate corresponding
revenue?
What if you could generate
highly accurate forecasts of
country sales and continually
adapt your models to regional
demand to create the most
profitable inventory, marketing
and sales strategies?
You can. SAS gives you
THE POWER TO KNOW®.
SAS Facts
• SAS is the de facto industry standard
for clinical trials data analysis and
reporting.
•For more than 39 years, life sciences
companies have used SAS to derive
greater insight from information.
•SAS has customers at more than
75,000 sites worldwide.
Learn more about SAS software and services for oil and gas at: sas.com/en_us/industry/life-sciences
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