Unifying Global Events Management
for More Productive Teams and
Higher-Impact Medical Events

Success Highlights

Replacing more than 40 fragmented systems worldwide, this top 20 pharma harmonized events management with a single system by redefining events-related standard operation procedures (SOPs) across the globe. A more coordinated relationship between the home office and the field means sales reps, field managers, medical affairs, and marketing all have access to the same source of truth, regardless of location. Since creating and launching a single process for managing events globally, the organization:

The Challenge: Inconsistent Execution and Limited Visibility across Global Events

Before implementing a new system to manage events, the company struggled with disjointed technologies across more than 20 European markets. Teams had difficulty monitoring global speaker usage and spending. Home office had little to no insight into regional events, and inconsistent event execution hurt HCP experience.

The organization needed a way to enforce a consistent global framework for events that automated compliance, provided built-in best practices, and offered deep, industry-specific functionality. Events teams including sales, marketing, and medical affairs also required a system that improved efficiency and simplified daily management of events.

The Solution: Veeva CRM Events Management

After an internal assessment of event processes, SOPs, and technology, the company decided to start fresh with Veeva CRM Events Management. Because their reps manage the majority of events, they needed a system that worked seamlessly with Veeva CRM.

Veeva CRM Events Management became the cornerstone of the company’s new event strategy. A highly agile solution, Veeva CRM Events Management enabled the organization to build granular workflows and processes, with the flexibility to adjust for regional compliance requirements.

The Pilot: Creating a Unified and Global Events Management Process

The top pharma launched an initial pilot of the solution in Europe and Latin America. With this centralized technology foundation in place, the organization began to rethink its event-related SOPs. It streamlined more than 45 different company policies to one core set of guidelines and reduced the 80 different page layouts (for different roles) to just 30 for all events globally. Since launching a unified process and best practice template for events, the organization can now focus on managing regional customizations built on this company-wide framework.

The Results: Global Simplification and Harmonization

After the pilot, the company introduced Veeva CRM Events Management to its sales, compliance, and IT leaders in its most strategic global markets. The rollout included training on the system and on how technology, people, and processes would work together to improve event impact.

The company benefits from a more coordinated relationship between home office and the field:

• Field users increased efficiency and productivity with automated speaker and attendee management: one of the organization’s most strategic markets now runs 75% more events with the same number of resources. Automated workflows cut approval processes from two months to two weeks, and training is down to two hours for field teams, leading to high adoption.
• Role-based functionality for medical and commercial teams helps ensure that each team has access only to the information they require; for example, sales teams cannot view the details of medical affairs’ engagements with HCPs at events. And, with greater visibility of shared stakeholders in the system, medical affairs teams can more easily pull lists on key opinion leaders (KOL) and share this information with commercial.
• All global spending against KOLs is tracked in a single location, improving cross-border event planning. Processing payments to KOLs now takes 48 hours instead of weeks, and the ability to manage HCP contracts directly in Veeva CRM Events Management has expedited approval to a matter of days.

Veeva CRM Events Management also helps regional teams meet local compliance requirements. In France, the DMOS law requires companies to declare and report all events to HCP professional associations. Previously, the company lacked an automated way to group similar events across all its brands and therapeutic areas. Now, the company is using Veeva CRM Events Management to provide a compliant summary of all events tied to a particular brand. This reduces the need to customize or build local systems for specific uses.

What’s Next?

The team is also looking to pilot Veeva CRM Engage Webinar, an application built on Veeva CRM Events Management that makes virtual events easy and compliant. Together, Veeva CRM Events Management and Veeva CRM Engage Webinar enable a new way of approaching all types of events for better execution.