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How Multi-domain MDM Drives More Insight and the Right Decisions with Better Data
Master data management (MDM) helps companies turn their data into useful insights, more informed decisions and, ultimately, better outcomes
Francesca D'Angelo, Dir, Information Management Commercial Offering
Jul 06, 2020

The promise

It’s understandable why business leaders in life sciences have mixed feelings about the increasing deluge of data they must contend with. On the one hand, it represents a significant opportunity. The more information that’s available to decision makers about consumers, healthcare professionals (HCPs), product performance and preferences, the better their decisions will be. At least that’s the promise.

The reality

Data is gathered and distributed in a variety of systems throughout the enterprise, so collating may result in inaccurate, incomplete or duplicative results. When it comes time to use such data in Customer Relationship Management (CRM), territory management or analytics, the results may be unclear, insufficient, or worse, misleading. In other words, the relevant insight may get lost in the noise.

The solution

For data to become truly meaningful, it needs to be cleaned, collated and seamlessly connected to the tools, solutions and processes you count on to run your business. In this scenario, master data management (MDM) helps companies turn their data into useful insights, more informed decisions and, ultimately, better outcomes for HCPs and patients as well as their business. In this article, we’re going to explore some scenarios in which businesses can use these insights to support improved business operations performance.

1. Promotional effectiveness

In many essential markets, gathering information about which HCP is prescribing what products is not allowed. This makes it complex for life sciences companies to evaluate the impact of promotional efforts on actual prescriptions. To overcome this problem, organizations usually go through a painstaking process of cross-referencing product promotion data against sales data organized by geography. In this context, having your data organized and governed in a consistent way across domains – and offering a comprehensive view of product, promotion, location and sales data – makes this information far easier to access, understand and analyze. Multidomain MDM solutions easily reduce errors and matching issues, which leads to more confident insight into which promotional efforts are most effective by territory.

2. Territory alignment

Seen from a different angle, this same data can help inform territory management by providing your territory management tool with more accurate data. An MDM solution enables the correlation of promotional data with product information and sales performance, empowering you to prevent field reps from being overwhelmed, focused on low-priority targets or improperly compensated. Additionally, rich attributes, including HCP location preferences, employee information for salespeople and product priorities per region, can yield insightful reporting.

3. Aggregate spend reporting

In response to laws such as the Sunshine Act and the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (EFPIA) HCP code, it’s incredibly important to report all physician compensation for speaker engagements and other common life sciences events. There are aggregate spend solutions that ease the process of reporting this information to regulatory bodies. What most of these solutions don’t do, however, is verify that the underlying data is clean and up to date and that no discrepancies threaten its accuracy and value. This is exactly the area where an MDM solution can play an important role in support of such reporting.

4. Compliance support

As organizations scale to reach new markets, they need to cope with a diversity of legislation such as country-based restrictions on promotion, whether by population or point of distribution. By aligning product data, customer data and geography, multidomain MDM solutions help companies gain clarity into who should be exposed to their promotional content, channel by channel, so they can avoid violative promotion.

What to look for

In many of these scenarios, your data is visible through an intermediate tool or solution that gives users the view, insight or reports they require. When considering a multidomain MDM solution, it’s important to ask some basic questions about how well it integrates with other data and applications:

1. Does it have pre-built connectors for the most commonly adopted systems and sources, thereby reducing the implementation cycle time and resources?

2. Does it offer APIs or batch solutions for integration and customization with critical line of business solutions?

3. Is the data model industry-specific enough and does it provide the flexibility to adapt to your current and future needs?

Affirmative answers to these questions put your company on a clear path to start taking advantage of the benefits discussed above.

The bottom line

The more you demand insights that will give you a competitive advantage, the more it matters that your data can be gathered and made available to you in a meaningful way. Whether used by sales, marketing or compliance teams, multidomain master data management delivers.

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