Coloplast Streamlines their Digital
Supply Chain with Vault PromoMats

Coloplast is a Danish multinational company that develops ostomy, continence, urology, wound, and skin care products and services that make life easier for people with sensitive healthcare needs. The company faced increasing pressure from regulators to adequately link claiming documents to promotional materials and provide a full audit trail. Fragmented systems and processes, however, made it difficult to achieve full visibility into their promotional materials. The company implemented Veeva Vault PromoMats and not only improved its ability to manage claims and associated source materials, but also increased the efficiency of its commercial content creation and review workflows. They now have greater visibility into how their content is being used and are able to better control and reuse content.

Challenges

Regulators have long required medical device and pharmaceutical manufacturers to back up all promotional claims with evidence. More recently, auditors reviewing promotional materials have begun to require that companies make it quicker and easier to match claims with supporting evidence as well as provide audit trails of who approved the documentation and when.

An independent team at the Coloplast headquarters and the North American subsidiary realized they had an inadequate process for linking claiming documents to promotional materials, as well as an insufficient audit trail. They were using an inefficient custom Microsoft SharePoint solution and simply sent Microsoft Word documents to auditors over email.

The North American business unit needed a solution to better track claims, but was also thinking bigger. “Our U.S. subsidiaries saw an opportunity to persuade headquarters to make sweeping improvements to our promotional content review and approval processes,” said Charlotte Sylvest, senior master data governance manager for Coloplast.

Coloplast relied on multiple, siloed systems and processes to manage their content. The company used email for many content management tasks and had no central repository for available content. This limited visibility into where and how assets were being used.

“The hope was that the initial claiming project would demonstrate the value of a platform to streamline the processes for creating, sharing, and reviewing content. This would address a range of inefficiencies that came from the use of disconnected, manual ways of doing business,” noted Sylvest.

The Solution

Multiple business units within Coloplast’s global operations are using Veeva Vault PromoMats to improve the approval process for promotional materials.

First, Coloplast addressed their issue with claims. Vault PromoMats allows marketing to tie each claim directly to individual paragraphs of supporting evidence and store everything in a central system. Auditors no longer spend hours questioning multiple people to determine which part of a research study applies to a particular claim. Audit trails show the history of the workflow that produced the document to demonstrate that the process meets regulatory demands.

Once their first project was completed successfully, the company standardized digital asset management on Vault PromoMats to combine creation, review, and distribution capabilities. Previously, individual product managers created their own approval processes, which relied heavily on email. Coloplast replaced the varied approval processes with a streamlined content workflow.

Instead of documents and videos being stored on individual hard drives and cloud-based file sharing applications across the organization, Vault PromoMats gives users a single source of the truth for all approved content and assets in the cloud. This is particularly important because marketing staff often transfer to different departments in the organization. Until recently, someone looking for content about a particular product had to know the individual responsible for it. Content was often lost when that person moved to a new position. Now, it’s easy to find all content by brand or campaign.

Product managers now have confidence that they’re using and printing the correct version of each piece of content. Coloplast is well positioned to reduce costs through content reuse and better asset management as they continue to develop their overall content strategy.

The Results

Coloplast is seeing substantial benefits across the organization.

Users in North America have achieved significant efficiencies due to greater visibility into available content. Auditors are spending much less time on reviews. According to Sylvest, “Instead of taking a half day to evaluate what they need to review for one piece, they can get a feel for what they’re up against in 15 minutes. While they may still need to spend time discussing some claims with the company, the overall process is much faster.”

Vault PromoMats has enabled Coloplast to achieve a more structured, process-driven way of working, visibility and control over where and how content is being used, and the security of knowing that their messaging adheres to regulatory guidelines.

Since deploying Vault PromoMats, the U.S. group has entered thousands of documents. Now that everyone can see what content is being created, they can start evaluating trends. Eventually, this analysis will help them reduce marketing spend by reusing content more effectively across the organization.