PCI Pharma Services – Contracts Management Workflow Tool
- Healthcare & Life Sciences
Overview
PCI Pharma Services is a global, integrated Contract Development & Manufacturing Organisation (CDMO) delivering a comprehensive range of pharmaceutical services from the earliest stages of development through to commercial launch and beyond.
Situation
PCI has grown rapidly over the last five years – especially within its clinical trial services division – and this growth has led to increased demand for proposals and contracts, including specific elements like legal agreements. Always keen to maximise digital opportunities to streamline business processes, the company engaged Mint to customise the company’s Salesforce Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system to facilitate the consistent management of contract workflows.
Solution
Responsible for Clinical Contracts Management across the organisation is Scott Collins and the specific aspect he asked Mint to develop was a bespoke Service Request Mechanism that would not only offer consistency, but also much greater transparency to show how his team were performing for their internal customers.
Mint began by running several scoping sessions to gather the requirements for the project. They then designed a process which would allow the Business Development Associates (BDAs) to raise Service Requests through a guided User Interface flow screen from the relevant Account and optionally link it to an Opportunity. This included a number of mandatory fields so that the Request could only go forward once a minimum level of information has been input to enable it to be actioned.
Also included was an option to alert the PCI Legal team as to whether they needed to create or review clients’ legal documents – things like Confidential Disclosure Agreements (CDAs) or Master Service Agreements (MSAs). If PCI needed to review, this would automatically create a new Agreement record and link the Service Request to it. If an Agreement expires, it automatically drops out of the system and is no longer available.
Final additional features were ‘Status Time Tracking’ and a dashboard facility so that any member of the BD team can log into the system and see immediately all their specific Services Requests, whether each one has been allocated, to whom, and where the Request is up to in the system. It also enables Scott to monitor and report on how long it takes his team to respond to Requests overall.
Results
Scott explained: ‘At the outset, we really weren’t sure if Salesforce had the capacity or flexibility to offer what we needed, and Mint were great to work with. They were insightful and knowledgeable, coming up with solutions to every problem we gave them.’
Scott’s Clinical Legal team members are now very happy with the new functionality and adoption has been high – which in turn has increased their ability to track and process Service Requests from the BDA team.
Building on this, a later phase of the project has seen the Development & Manufacturing (D&M) Legal team moving to the new process (with a few adaptations specific to their needs).
‘From our conversations with Mint, there is even more automation that we will eventually be able to build into the system, so I couldn’t be happier,’ said Scott.
“Mint are great to work with. They were insightful and knowledgeable, coming up with solutions to every problem we gave them!”
Scott Collins
Senior Director, Contracts Management