MDS Pharma Services: turning the microscope onto business performance

In the race to bring much-needed drugs to market faster, leading pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies worldwide rely on clinical research organizations (CROs). MDS Pharma Services is one of the world’s leading CROs, providing innovative drug discovery and development services.

A business unit of MDS Inc. (TSX:MDS; NYSE:MDZ), MDS Pharma Services applies advanced scientific and technological expertise throughout the drug discovery and development process – from lead optimization, early clinical research and bio-analysis to global clinical development, central lab and centralized cardiac services. The company’s goal is to bring speed, precision and productivity to drug discovery and development.

Challenges Faced
MDS Pharma Services was looking for a business monitoring solution that would enable rapid response to fast-changing market conditions, better insight into its sales opportunity pipeline, and improved financial performance. The company needed to understand the entire customer relationship - from sales proposal to signed contract - monitor project milestones, and calculate and compare the value of strategic opportunities year over year, by customer and other key competitive factors. And, it needed this information in hours, not days.

Accurate, timely forecasts of revenue and customer demand would help sales teams close more deals, bring higher profits and align expenses with revenue growth. With a better understanding of the most profitable strategic accounts and improved decision-making capability, MDS Pharma Services would also serve the needs of its customers better.

MDS Pharma Services needed a business monitoring solution that could tap into its existing customer relationship management (CRM) platform, its enterprise resource management (ERP) system, and other applications, to deliver key financial metrics, such as the number of signed contracts as a percentage of total sales opportunities, or the number of days sales outstanding (DSO) in accounts receivable.

However, getting these kinds of metrics was difficult and time - consuming using the company’s existing reporting platform. Adding to the challenge was the storage of relevant information in multiple systems. To improve the ratio of closed contracts, it was critical to have a seamless flow of information from the CRM and ERP systems.

“We wanted to see the whole picture - the date when a sales lead was created, and how long it took to become a closed opportunity and contract, so we could compare our performance to the prior year. And we wanted this information now,” explains Kellie Terry, IT Director, Program Management Office at MDS Pharma Services.

Strategy Followed
To bridge the gap between its CRM and ERP systems, and gain immediate insight into opportunity, revenue and profitability metrics, MDS Pharma Services sought a continuous monitoring solution that would meet these business and technology requirements:

• Financial dashboards to provide daily metrics and analyze profitability year over year
• Ability to connect to multiple data sources and multiple data objects, and display them in a single view
• Accurate, timely forecasts of revenue and customer demand to help sales teams close more deals, realize higher profits and align expenses with revenue growth
• Low total cost of ownership (TCO) through an easy-to-maintain solution with an adaptable user interface for business user self-service.

MDS Pharma Services selected IBM Cognos Now!, the industry’s first continuous business monitoring appliance that helps decision makers proactively track, monitor and respond to continuously updated operational metrics in real time or near real time. IBM Cognos Now! delivers highly visual, interactive and self-service operational dashboards, data integration, streaming analytics, and reports - all prepackaged in either a hardware, software or VMware appliance.

With all required software pre-installed for fast and easy deployment, IBM Cognos Now! was installed and running at MDS Pharma Services in just five days. Over 100 users were provided access to the system in the first implementation phase, including the sales, finance, IT and operations frontlines, as well as C-Level executives. Many were up and running in just eight weeks. The solution’s easy integration with existing systems and ability to consolidate data from multiple sources greatly accelerated time to results.

“One of the nice features of the IBM Cognos tool is the consolidated data stream,” observes Ms. Terry. “You can create an agent in IBM Cognos Now! that connects to most data sources and eliminates all the manual work of consolidating and crunching numbers. Now we can see not only our pipeline and projects, but the longevity and profitability of our projects, so we can target the most profitable opportunities.”

Benefits Realized
IBM Cognos Now! has helped MDS Pharma understand the entire customer relationship - from sales lead to signed contract to project milestones - and which of its managers and business units have the best customer relationships. Managers can proactively monitor strategic accounts on a daily or hourly basis. And week after week, financial managers have continuously improved accounts receivable, reduced DSO and fine-tuned year over year financial metrics.

Financial and AR professionals can drill down to the actual invoice level, see AR aging, back-load aging by business unit, view the top 10 customers with open transactions and slice invoicing data by any criteria. Users can also upload Microsoft® Excel® spreadsheets for look-up in context. Even if the header data is different, IBM Cognos Now! can consolidate data from disparate sources into a single dashboard view.

About IBM Cognos BI and Performance Management
IBM Cognos business intelligence (BI) and performance management solutions deliver world-leading enterprise planning, consolidation and BI software, support and services to help companies plan, understand and manage financial and operational performance. IBM Cognos solutions bring together technology, analytical applications, best practices, and a broad network of partners to give customers an open, adaptive and complete performance solution. Over 23,000 customers in more than 135 countries around the world choose IBM Cognos solutions.

For further information or to reach a representative: www.ibm.com/cognos