Shionogi’s Journey to Accelerated Business Insights

Since entering the European market in 2014, Shionogi has rapidly expanded its women’s healthcare portfolio and added a hospital specialty business on top of their primary care business. They recognized that their leaders and field reps needed business insights faster to make effective go-to-market decisions. Over the past year, Shionogi invested in a data management solution that helped them harness the value of their data for continued commercial success and digital transformation.

I had the opportunity to speak with Dan Atkins, vice president of digital innovation at Shionogi, to learn how they selected, implemented, and adopted their data solution. Here are some key takeaways from our session at Veeva Commercial and Medical Summit, Europe:

Selecting the Right Data Solution

Atkin’s data management vision was to have a “single data” source of truth that enabled Shionogi to report on a regional level instead of a country-by-country basis. There was a strong need to automate commercial analytics so that teams could eliminate repetitive work requiring laborious manual processes. Shionogi also needed a solution that would scale up rapidly as they grew. Their ultimate goal was to provide actionable business insights quickly and enable agile decision making.

Veeva Nitro was selected as their solution of choice because of its ability to meet Shionogi’s unique data management needs. Atkins said, “Veeva Nitro is fast and easy. It works globally, regionally, and locally. It works extremely well with Veeva’s other products and does not require extensive configuration. That gave us a competitive advantage in lockdown because we really understood what was happening”.

Deploying the New Capability

With Veeva Nitro, Shionogi seamlessly integrated data from multiple sources, including activity data from Veeva CRM, content data from Veeva Vault PromoMats, and third-party data. This single source of truth allowed senior management and franchise heads to analyze and visualize data in Tableau. Sales managers and field reps gained access to insights via Veeva CRM MyInsights.

Shionogi followed a multi-pronged approach for their Veeva Nitro implementation. Atkins had the foresight to know that a successful implementation and lasting change management depended on their ability to assemble a governance and best practices team. This core working group was responsible for defining the solution vision, setting standards, leading the implementation, and driving change. Here are key activities for each implementation phase:

First Phase: Conducted a thorough analysis of their internal and external data sources.

Second Phase: Collaborated across regions to determine and agree upon the right key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure so they could compare activities and results in a standardized way.

Third Phase: Designed custom dashboards for each user group that delivered precise and relevant information for their role.

Final Phase: Ran a validation exercise comparing Nitro’s data with results from their traditional analysis to ensure accuracy. This exercise helped gain buy-in, establish trust, and drive product adoption.

Atkins said, “Everything we are doing is recorded in Nitro. It stores ten years of activity. We might not know what correlations or decisions we have in our system at the moment. But we know that they are ready for us to use in the future.”

Adopting the Solution

As Shionogi shifted to a multichannel digital engagement strategy during COVID-19, Veeva Nitro enabled them to monitor outreach activities and adapt their approach based on business insights. Some of the activities tracked using Veeva Nitro were:

• The number of rep-to-HCP calls: Atkins gave the example of a Southern European territory. Shionogi’s call rate declined by only 50% at the end of February. The reason for this was the extremely rapid deployment of Veeva CRM Engage Meeting to conduct remote calls with HCPs. By the end of June, the HCP engagement rate had returned to 75% of the pre-lockdown normal. HCP interactions were now a hybrid mix of face-to-face calls and Engage Meeting sessions.
• Webinars: Shionogi used Veeva CRM Approved Email to send webinar invites and leveraged Veeva Nitro to gain deep customer insights into the best ways and times to engage with their audience. This strategy allowed their teams to evaluate the effectiveness of their efforts and fine-tune accordingly.
• Virtual consent collection: Shionogi leveraged Approved Email to gain ‘virtual consent’ signatures online, via double opt-in and used Veeva Nitro to track submissions, manage reporting and compliance.

Watch the session replay to learn more about Shionogi’s journey to accelerated business insights.

About Shionogi: Shionogi is a 140-year-old Japanese pharmaceutical company that started expanding into Europe in 2014 to commercialize three new products in their women’s healthcare business. Fast forward to today, Shionogi is in multiple European countries, their women’s healthcare portfolio has expanded to eight products, and they have added a hospital specialty business on top of their primary care business.