New Industry Survey Reveals Significant Compliance Gaps in Promotional Content Management

Life sciences companies say that when it comes to managing promotional content, they are missing key capabilities that would improve compliance efforts. This is one of the key takeaways from a global survey of more than 200 regulatory, marketing, and medical professionals, commissioned by Veeva Systems and conducted by Fierce Markets. The purpose of the survey was to determine which types of promotional content management systems are currently in use and how pleased life sciences companies are with the primary systems they are using.

Preliminary findings from the survey reveal that the majority of companies rely on multiple systems to manage promotional content, using an average of four systems total. Surprisingly, the most popular primary promotional management system is still paper and/or email. Not only that, but even among those companies using more sophisticated primary systems, a large number still use paper and email to manage at least some promotional content management tasks.

Companies, overall, are dissatisfied with this patchwork approach to promotional content management, with multiple breakpoints and information handoffs. One reason for the dissatisfaction is potentially costly compliance gaps.

While almost half of those surveyed automate part of the promotional content management process – review and approval – companies cited a number of other functions, which, if automated, would aid compliance. For instance, when it comes to withdrawing a promotional claim from the public domain, most companies either have to manually verify a claim has been removed from all documents, or they have no way to verify it at all. A majority of survey respondents said automated claim withdrawal would improve compliance.

The survey also revealed that adding specific automated capabilities throughout the promotional content asset lifecycle may help companies reduce use of supplementary systems and finally move to a fully digital process. That’s because one group of survey respondents – those using industry-specific end-to-end promotional content management systems – relied significantly less on secondary systems to complete all functions across the digital supply chain. This group also reported significantly higher satisfaction (80%-100%) with their primary promotional content management system.

Moving to fully-digital promotional content management systems takes on added urgency going forward, as companies prepare for mandatory digital submissions to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 2017. Where is your company along the journey towards an optimally-compliant, fully-digital, end-to-end approach to promotional content management? Get the early survey results and find out how your organization compares.