Striving for Product Launch Excellence

Product launch excellence is now a required core competency for every successful pharma company.

The Recipe for Success

Pharma companies rarely have a second chance to make a significant impact with a new product. The strongest indicator of long-term product success is sales performance within the first nine months of launch. The key factors for a successful product launch are well known in the industry.

Shape the Product

Blockbuster drugs are not just discovered, they are proactively designed. The key to a well-shaped product is excellent coordination between R&D and the commercial functions early on in the product’s development. Early commercial inputs, market research, and key opinion leader (KOL) are essential. Health outcomes analysis and a compelling value story for the managed market environment is a necessity.

 Shape the Market

Attaining a steep penetration and maximization of sales is primarily a consequence of marketing investments aimed at conditioning the market over several years, rather than a few months prior to or during the launch. Broad clinical trials can be used to grow the awareness among physicians, increasing the percentage of physicians that have had experience with the product prior to launch. Scenario planning and war games provide vital insight into the future competitive landscape and prepare launch teams to succeed in multiple scenarios.

Shape the Organization

Product launches always results in organizational change. Companies launching products in a new therapeutic area will require a new infrastructure ; products launched into an existing portfolio mandate coordinated positioning and decisions about shared resources. Conflicts for scarce resources must be managed, and synergies need to be maximized.

The Reality is Different

However, we have had to recognize much too often that launch activities are not designed for excellence.

Strategy—How It All Fits Together

A product with a poor strategy is doomed to fail long before the main investments are made. Lack of a clear vision, poor life cycle planning and/or positioning within the portfolio and competing products will provide significant barriers to success .

Today’s Planning—Tomorrow’s Success

To achieve optimum returns , early planning across functions and geographies is a major step to a successful launch. For individual countries, the launch team, staffed with the right resources, must commit to at least two years’ preparation. Lack of dedicated program management resources specifically at tier two pharmaceutical companies often contributes to planning and coordination problems.

Think Globally—Act Locally

Globally coordination often takes the back seat after local optimization. A quick succession of roll-outs, strategically selected for the best reference price is required—with implications for phase III studies, pricing, and registration strategies.

Balancing Short-Term and Long-Term Priorities

Prioritizing short-term over long-term needs is a common mistake. In the case of product launch , budgetary restrictions and resource conflicts due to operational challenges at the start of the launch can lead to delayed launch activities and a frantic rush when the launch meeting draws near.

Achieving the milestones takes precedence over maximizing the sales, despite better judgment.

Communication and Coordination

In our experience, communication and collaboration breakdowns are frequently discovered at the interfaces between organizational units, and product launches are no exception. Whereas individual functions execute well within their areas of responsibility, too often we witness a lack of appropriate communication and effective collaboration across functions and between alliance partners, leading to limited understanding, reduced effectiveness, and painful surprises down the road.

World Class Execution

Finally, a well orchestrated strategy can lead nowhere if the proper tactical plan and teams are not in place to implement it. Very often, launch teams fail to establish clear roles and responsibilities, conduct sub-optimal meetings, lack visibility and discipline, and fail to conduct the appropriate contingency planning and risk management exercises to avoid key pitfalls . Product launch execution will challenge every organization, and will separate the best from the rest.

SIMULTANEOUS LAUNCHES

While retaining the focus on selling your current products, you want to initiate four parallel product launches within a short timeframe, encountering significant resource constraints as well as organizational changes.

How would you launch the products successfully in the target timeframe while transforming a single product company into a portfolio company?

Solution:

• Assess the launch readiness of each of the launch teams
• Review and establish clear launch governance, validating product strategies and developing detailed product launch plans
• Optimize the portfolio positioning and identifying initiatives to maximize the lifecycle value of the  portfolio
• Drive project management activities
• Ad-hoc resolution of a variety of issues identified during the launch
• Build organizational knowledge through training, knowledge capturing, and ongoing knowledge transfer.

(Abstract from the source: “Striving for Product Launch Excellence” │A Whitepaper by Capgemini—One of the world’s foremost providers of Consulting, Technology and Outsourcing – www.capgemini.com │© 2007 Capgemini)