Delivering high quality at low costs

One of the world’s top five pharma companies was looking to increase productivity and realise significant cost savings, without compromising on quality in their data management and statistical programming functions. This would be one of the largest transformations of its kind in this industry. Our client selected ICON, as their single global functional provider, supporting the consolidation of their outsourced workforce and organisational redesign, implementing a significant shift in their operational model and global infrastructure.

Our ability to support a large-scale ramp-up in a short timeframe, employing 300 professionals in 5 months and scaling up to 500 within a year was a key factor in our selection. However, it was our consultative approach to the implementation, our ability to share our infrastructure and maintain business continuity that has made this a lasting partnership.

We have delivered a sustainable and cost effective model for the long term that has realised 20% cost efficiencies with a 30% reduction in client burden while missing no priority goals in the transition. We continue to meet the quality and performance metrics, while maintaining supply despite team growth of over 50%.

Our client decided to outsource its data management and statisical programming functions. What was in theory a practical move eventually proved to be a complex matrix, as no less than 20 different providers were delivering these services with 500 team members, primarily based in the US and Europe. This created a complex oversight environment for our client, with duplication of effort causing inefficiencies, and ultimately, becoming unsustainable due to the high-cost of the local labour markets.

Our client turned to us to help them to create a new more sustainable organisational design. We helped them to shift how and where these functions were located, moving to centralised hubs in medium and lower cost locations in India and EMEA. Outsourcing the implementation and management of the teams to us, as their single trusted provider, removed significant client oversight burden.

Our role was threefold:

• Create the infrastructure to support the operational shift
• Strategically resource and manage the function
• Increase the quality level of work and minimise disruption during the change

Leveraging our past experience and centring on our client’s goal we focused on three key areas through the initial phase of work:

1. Building the infrastructure globally
As we shifted the team locations from high-cost to low-cost areas we needed to design and establish the new hub infrastructure to support a more globally diverse team. This needed to be a strong, lean framework that would support our client’s evolving pipeline.

Once we agreed the infrastructure, we strategically designed the function, identifying operational managers with the right skills in the right regions. These managers are people managers, but also subject matter experts, and have an important role in on-boarding as well as learning and development for the team.

2. Resourcing and functional management
We were successful in creating the new team of 500 people on schedule. We leveraged our dedicated FSP resourcing team, as well as drawing on the existing client team and ICON’s employees to source the right people with the right skillset.

We are responsible for recruitment, performance management, competency enhancement and personal development and compliance. Team leads work closely with our client and ICON project, trial and lead programmers, ensuring a consistent approach, dealing with any issues arising such as competency gaps.

3. Business continuity and quality oversight
To ensure business continuity we formed a joint implementation team with our client. This team focused on five key workstreams; recruitment, training, HR, IT systems and quality oversight. Communications and change management were also key focuses during the transition phase and as we moved to business-as usual.

Management of the handover of projects needed to be planned and executed diligently, ensuring scheduling to support forthcoming deliverables and timelines.

4. Evolution of the operating model
Initially the model focused on providing FTE resources but as the partnership has progressed our team have been able to move some of the service delivery to a unit-based model. The advantages to our client are predictability of costs, based on forecast volumes, and removal of under-utilisation impacts.

This approach incentivises our team to optimise resource deployment and identify opportunities to implement process efficiencies. Planning and forecasting to support service delivery in the unit-based model then became entirely the responsibility of our team, further reducing client overhead.

This was the largest transformation this industry has ever seen and we delivered it faster than any of the smaller and less complex transformations with no disruption to programme.

We achieved the ramp-up and implementation, meeting all of our client’s targets as well as achieving cost savings of 56% overall. Additionally we have been able to deliver continuous improvement year-on-year of 5 percent.

Ultimately we enabled our client to consolidate its operations, minimising the need for their oversight and shifting to a lower-cost region on schedule and with all targets achieved.