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Multi-Country Implementations

Jul 22, 2016 | vs_admin

In Asia Pacific, customers are often looking to standardize and roll out a scalable solution that also fits the needs of the individual markets.

With Veeva, companies can choose how to deploy, what to deploy and when to deploy to individual markets. Veeva focuses on implementing best practices and ensuring that customers get the best return on investment. Go-Live is the start of the journey as compared to the end of the journey in traditional software implementation.

Requirements is a minor piece of the puzzle, customers want to achieve the following:

  • Increase system flexibility and usability
  • Reduce time required to make changes
  • Increase scalability
  • Decrease system maintenance effort and cost
  • Improve Collaboration
  • Integrate easily with external systems
  • Improve efficiency and increase productivity

    • First Step – Deciding the architecture: Architecture decisions are based on

  • Governance Model that you have internally or want to setup
  • Regional Standards and Common Practices
  • Local Needs and Country Requirements
  • Support and Administration

    • Some questions to ask yourselves

    Governance

  • Are you going to standardize for the entire region?
  • Is there going to be any flexibility at the country level?
  • How often do your processes change and is it applicable to specific countries or to the region?
  • Will you have complex local processes that need to be built?
  • Will you extend any local process to the region?
  • Can collaborative governance be established to manage priorities across the business structure?
      • Process for collecting and managing requirements?
      Process for prioritizing goals?
  • Considerations – What if it takes 2 months for an update to be made because of governance meeting frequency and decision. Is that acceptable to some countries?
  • Effective Governance must determine where regional functionality ends and local begins

    • Regional Standards

  • What does your requirement analysis for the region look like? What % is similar and to what extent can you harmonize?
  • Is your targeting and frequency standardized?
  • How does your Call Planning and Execution work across the region?
  • What about Key Account Management – is the process the same?
  • What do your Cycle Plans / Call Frequency look like?

    • Country Specific Requirements

  • Call Signatures – Some countries like Philippines needs to get a signature from the HCP at the end of every call made.
  • Sampling – Do all your affiliates drop samples and is there a sample audit process? Do you have sample limits or restrictions imposed by medical councils?
  • Prescription Audit – In India, the Sales team speaks with the pharmacists to understand HCP’s prescription behavior.
  • OTC and Order Management — Our past experience tells us that you need to prepare in a different way to accommodate Order Management.
  • Are all members of your field force on your payroll or do you have contract employees?

    • Support and Administration

  • Who will support your users once you go live?
  • Are countries paying for maintenance or is it going to be funded regionally?
  • Will you have local system administrators supporting day to day operational needs?
  • How will you manage releases and various environments?
  • How will you handle Change Requests?

    • getting ready for multi-country
    what does a multi-country implementation look like?

    Keys to Success

    Stakeholder Buy-In and Alignment
    Good Governance
    Strong Project Team
    Realistic Deployment roadmap
    Internal Champions
    Change Management
    Great Training
    Smooth transition to support
    Clean Requirements
    Transform Not Replace
    —ƒ
    Example of a staggered multi-country rollout

    11 country staggered development

    Req: Requirements Gathering | Config: Configuration | UAT: User Acceptance Testing | TTT: Train The Trainer

    In the above example, not all countries were ready to embark on a new system, and were restricted by availability, existing contracts with other service providers and general readiness.

    Veeva Professional services team worked with the customers regional team and project team to develop a core architecture model and define a strong foundation. Over a period of time depending on when countries wanted to adopt Veeva, a project plan was created and countries were on-boarded on to the application.

    The customer’s regional team also wanted to ensure that some of the features and functionalities released as part of the version upgrades (three upgrades every year), could be leveraged by every country. As part of the engagement, the services team worked with the customer to continuously enhance the product. In some cases the customer was able to handle these enhancements independently without any support from Veeva.

    Contact us to learn more about different implementation methodologies and to prepare for a multi-country rollout—¦.