Paper to PromoMats – Recap from Commercial Summit 2014

Efficient management of promotional material depends on collaborative creation, approvals, multichannel distribution and withdrawal, and having a clear chain of custody across all channels.

At Veeva Commercial Summit 2014, seven leading life sciences companies shared their experiences managing promotional materials from end-to-end. One thing was clear: promotional materials management is much more than just reviews and approvals. It needs to take into account multichannel distribution of the content, as well as updates, withdrawal, and expiry. Compliance is important not only while undergoing reviews, but also after the content has been distributed.

There were lively discussions about moving from manual MLR processes to the cloud, and how to effectively manage innovation and change.

Key insights from our customer panelists:

• Establishing standard operating procedures (SOPs) is important, but having the system and process flexibility to evolve is truly key.
• Utilizing a subject matter expert (SME) training (a.k.a. the train the trainer approach) is effective. Training should also provide adequate business context—not just focus on features and functions.
• Timing of rollouts is important. For the cutover to new documents, organizations need to take both internal and external events into consideration.
• Small design considerations (e.g. numbering, naming) may have a big impact. Reviewing and discussing the impact of all design choices leads to more optimal processes.
• Companies are leveraging Veeva Vault PromoMats and the Vault Platform for various use cases – extending beyond core promotional materials management.

Accenture’s session, “Voice of Your Customers – What They Want and How They Want it Around the Globe,” discussed how companies benefit from multichannel content distribution and as it stated, the payoff is big.

Organizations are creating content once, and reusing it across channels and geographies via the cloud – while maintaining compliance throughout the process, from creation to approval, and beyond.

John Chinnici is director, North America Commercial Vault at Veeva.