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The beginning of a new year is the perfect time to evaluate your business and its ability to handle new challenges and opportunities.  A key factor to this process is ensuring that your methodology for getting work done is up to date. “To achieve the full benefits of mobile, cloud, data analytics and social media, a company’s mission-critical systems need to be agile and open enough to enable these new ways of doing business. That’s why modernization is so vital to today’s small to midsize businesses,” writes Joe McKendrick at Microsoft.  In some ways it doesn’t matter what the process is as long as you are achieving the results through a standard, repeatable process.

This article is the first in a series on modernizing your business.  Today, we’re focusing on the benefits of modernizing your work process.  By work process we mean a set of activities geared toward transforming input into valuable output.  Put another way, a work process is a collection of steps meant to culminate in something useful for your business. Work processes will naturally vary from company to company, but the principles behind developing a sound work process apply to all businesses that offer products and services to pharmaceutical companies.  

The benefits of a modern work process can’t be realized unless you have the right team evaluate your process.  An outside review of your business process, including how you develop new products and services, can be especially useful for learning how your process compares to others and where you can improve it.  

The Benefits of a Modern Work Process

1. Mindfulness

A modern work process forces you to be more mindful while completing tasks, even in the face of new distractions.  Instead of relying on sheer willpower to get things done, a good work process should organize and direct your steps so that you can more easily stay on track.  This type of approach also focuses on the big picture. Rather than putting out small fires throughout the day, your work process provides a roadmap for accomplishing what is critical to your goal.

2. Efficiency

Businesses that have modern work processes in place can reduce costs and increase productivity by eliminating redundancies and increasing cost-saving measures such as automation.  On the flip side, an inefficient work process can wreak havoc on your output.  “Bad workflow cripples your team: it makes it less efficient and team members end up frustrated. It means you deliver worse work slower, don’t keep clients or stakeholders as happy as they should be, and lose money,” notes Frederik Vincx.

3. Agility

Along with increased efficiency, a properly modernized work process will enable your business to remain adaptable and able to interface with other modernized companies in new ways.  Tools like cloud-based computing, remote collaboration, social media, and multi-channel communication save time and money while increasing flexibility.  A modernized business has the agility to take on new projects and responsibilities better than its out-of-date competitors.

4. Collaboration

Team members are critical to the success of most businesses yet are often overlooked when developing new or updated work processes.  A modern work process takes into consideration staff to ensure that everyone is on the same page, understands the big picture, and knows what is expected of him or her.  Modern work processes enable team members to focus on project outcomes instead of getting bogged down by endless administrative and menial tasks.

5. Measurability

Successful work processes can be evaluated and improved upon because they are measurable.  Forbes contributor Dan Woods notes, “If [your work process] is carefully designed, you can start measuring what you are doing, make incremental adjustments and optimize your operations. Without well-defined processes, how can you really improve systematically?” Diligently documenting your work process allows you to evaluate and refine it.

6. Consistency

If your business cannot consistently create valuable output, a modern work process can help. When an effective process is in place, “each task is executed the way it was planned and designed. Identical problems are addressed the same way and there is no need to reinvent the wheel,” writes Stephanie Famuyide. In the same vein, modernized work processes can detect and overcome inconsistencies in your business.  

Pharmaceutical Industry Considerations

Though much of the pharma industry is centered around the inherently slow process of moving from R&D to public offering, having a modern work process in place can help your company provide better products and services to pharma companies.  Here’s how:

1. Innovate

Marketplace shifts like healthcare reform or changes to Medicare Part D require the ability to develop products and solutions that meet new challenges.  A modern work process can increase innovation by speeding your new product development and launch process.  

2. Adapt

Your company likely has assets in place that were developed for a specific purpose.  When the market changes, those assets must change with it or risk becoming liabilities. A modern work process can help you adapt those assets for continuing sustainability as well as for a broader application than originally intended.

3. Regroup

A modern business process enables your company to more quickly and efficiently deal with setbacks.  Because you have a framework in place to create or adapt assets, you can more easily regroup and pivot when a setback arises without having start again from scratch.

4.  Compete

A company that keeps pace with current technologies and methods of accomplishing tasks will also have a competitive edge over companies that don’t.  This is especially true when it comes to increasingly-popular cost-saving methods like automation and data-driven decision-making. Technology that lightens the load of administrative tasks can free you up to handle important business matters or save you the time and expense of hiring additional personnel.

How Effective is your Work Process?

Does your company have an effective, modern work process in place? Effectiveness can be measured in the number of new services offered, new clients gained and the effort to develop new offerings. Over the past 25 years, we’ve helped businesses that serve pharma companies develop work processes that have successfully moved dozens of products to market.  Our process is to do a quick, internal interview to identify issues and propose ways to improve workflow especially around developing new services you can offer your clients. We have found that increasing your proactive approach to designing new solutions is a key growth of existing and new clients. If your company’s work process could use some outside perspective, contact us today.