Out-performing ambitions with strategic capacity management

One of the world’s leading pharmaceutical companies sought to improve the quality of its deliverables while reducing attrition and lessening its management burden.

In selecting ICON as one of its two Functional Service Provision (FSP) partners, the sponsor established a competitive model through which we have proven ourselves over the course of more than a decade.

We built a dedicated global infrastructure, rolled out a global performance management plan, and built a culture of growth and accountability for the team. We have delivered a 20 percent savings in employment costs, reduced the Sponsor’s management burden by 30 percent and out-performed the competition in terms of identifying and securing high quality resource.

Our client had been using a distributed sourcing model around the globe. Relying on providers to maintain its workforce of nearly 2,000 resources and following a reactive, internal hiring strategy. The result was that research programmes and studies were inefficiently supported, quality was unpredictable – sourcing strategies, role profiles, and processes varied widely by country.

Following an internal review, our client needed to:

1. Be assured of scalable supply – made difficult by the fact that the portfolio demand was significant and unpredictable along both functional and geographic lines
2. Improve quality and reduce performance-related attrition
3. Reduce the internal burden of managing a team of close to 2,000

Our client selected us as one of its two global strategic partners to provide functional services in a direct competitive model.

We built dedicated infrastructure to support the sponsor’s operations in project resource management & data analytics, IT, HR, resourcing, and legal. The effort was led by our Global Vice President of Operations and supported by global business service lines, functional and regional directors, as well as by local in-country line managers.

In partnership with our client, we rolled out a global plan to oversee quality, support consistent performance, ensure compliance, and identify opportunities for ongoing innovation. As part of this, we developed global standard operating procedures (SOPs), key performance indicators (KPIs) and a governance structure.

Our operations teams collaborated with our client to create a clear identity for, and culture of success within, the programme, focusing on the personal development for our staff. As the relationship continues, our line managers, with support from ICON University, prepare our team with the right technical skills and competencies, targeted training, and qualifications for their next role and career pathway(s) within the FSP programme.

Our dedicated line managers have taken ownership of the performance data underpinning our KPIs and metrics. We’re using our analytics capabilities to ensure we understand, proactively address, and learn to predict performance trends highlighted by our data insights.

Finally, we continue to review and advise our client on model best practices as we centralise and rationalise transactional tasks and build centres of excellence to maximise productivity. Since the beginning of our partnership, our client has implemented three new functional hub strategies exclusively with us.

Through our flexible operational infrastructure, predictive data analytics, and in-country expertise we’ve consistently been able to deliver over 60 percent of all required resources, despite working in direct competition with the second CRO partner.

Within the last 18 months alone, and thanks to our adoption of best practices in quality management and oversight, we’ve been able to reduce the overall time that our client spends in managing outsourced functions by more than 30 percent. The sponsor has subsequently rolled out our recommended practices globally, including for use by their second CRO partner.

By introducing dedicated functional hubs and centres of excellence, we reduced our client’s cost per FTE by over 20 percent on average. We also achieved additional productivity savings of 20 percent on a like-for-like basis by rationalizing and centralizing tasks delivered through lower FTE requirements.

Throughout the partnership, quality has been a major foundation of our approach. Performance-related attrition is now below one percent and continues to decline. Meanwhile, as we find more ways to develop and engage both our own people and within our client’s business, the average tenure of our staff continues to increase.