Life Sciences
Product development in the life sciences industry is
marked by high research & development costs, long
lead times, and low success rates of profitable product
launches. With these challenges, life sciences companies
must very carefully decide in which products to invest
and ultimately take to market. This involves eliciting
input from the right people and properly accounting for
risks very early in the planning and analysis phase. In
addition to individual products, the portfolio as a whole
must be carefully planned to balance risk and reward.
Without the proper upfront planning and analysis, even
the most attractive opportunities can quickly become
unprofitable cost sinks.
Solutions
The Vanguard System™ is a comprehensive business
solution for improving the quality, reliability, and
speed of management decisions. It does this by helping
you Collaborate with colleagues
on important plans, Analyze alternatives
using state-of-the-art modeling and simulation
techniques, Automate routine
decisions using expert system technology, and Improve
overall management effectiveness by adding
structure to a normally chaotic process.
Business improvement is all about working smarter.
Vanguard brings together the people, analytics, and
systems required to help your business operate
intelligently.
Here are just a few of the ways Vanguard supports the
life sciences industry:
- Product development: Accurately
estimate lifecycle profitability and forecast
adoption across all channels.
- Demand forecasting: Predict
demand for final products and raw materials, even
when historical data is scarce.
- Mix / Portfolio analysis:
Optimize product portfolios, pricing, and
promotions.
- Risk analysis: Vanguard is the
first risk analysis solution that leverages the
combined power of your collective intelligence
and our proven analytical methods to give you
complete risk-based visibility and insight into
your business.
- Strategic planning: Vanguard
fully quantifies the financial and operational
impacts of strategic decisions at all levels of
the organization.
- Sales and operations planning (S&OP):
Enable real-time collaboration between
Marketing & Sales and Operations to ensure
production capacity can profitably support
customer demand (and vice versa).
- Surveys and research: Know your
market and understand your customers' needs,
wishes, and opinions using online surveys.
Content Management System (CMS)
Vanguard Content Management System (CMS) is a Web-based expert system development tool for non-programmers. CMS Web-based applications guide customers or employees through complex decision-making processes using interactive, automated question and answer sessions. They are core software applications that can improve the operational efficiency of your key business processes.
CMS applications can support life sciences as product selectors for biotech, pharmaceuticals, and other products and services. Customers can answer questions from the CMS application and receive a detailed listing of the products and services that meet their needs.
Life sciences customer support specialists can walk through CMS support scripting applications to enforce consistency in communication and to assist specialists in deciding on which questions to ask customers.
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Case Studies

Novartis Forecasts R&D Pipeline Performance and Optimizes Vaccine Acquisition Decisions.
Case Study

Challenge
To improve its portfolio management process, Novartis first required better forecasts of how vaccine development projects might move through its R&D pipeline. Then, using these pipeline performance forecasts, Novartis sought to optimize its acquisitions of new vaccines to augment its existing R&D project portfolio. Finally, Novartis needed to understand how its portfolio management decisions translated into financial performance.
Solution
Using Vanguard System's Simulation-based Forecasting features, Novartis accurately models how each of the vaccines individually progresses through its virtual lifecycle. "We had been using spreadsheets to model the process, but they could not handle the complexities of our business. We were being forced to simplify the models to the point of being inaccurate," says Dr. Joachim Schwarzkopf. Novartis is now able to incorporate a wide range of risk and uncertainty assumptions about each vaccine development project such as stage/phase durations, costs, likelihoods of advancement, and the spawning of new projects.
"We are making strategic decisions that have long-term impacts on our business. Without Vanguard System, we would not have the visibility and analysis we need to make the right decisions."
Joachim Schwarzkopf, MBA, PhD, Senior Portfolio
Manager Novartis Vaccines & Diagnostics
Download the complete Novartis case study.
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Healthcare Econometrics uses Vanguard to
improve product adoption and marketability
forecasts.
Case Study

Challenge
Healthcare Econometrics, a division of Applied
Quantitative Sciences, Inc., builds decision
support and risk analysis applications for some
of the largest medical device, pharmaceutical and
biotechnology companies in the world. Healthcare
Econometrics needed a scalable, enterprise-class
modeling and simulation tool to build the very
large-scale and complex market simulation models
that their clients demanded.
Solution
Vanguard is the tool of choice for Healthcare
Econometrics. They have built a suite of
simulation models for product adoption and
marketability forecasts. These models are
cutting-edge and, according to Healthcare
Econometrics, simply could not have been built in
any other modeling and simulation tool on the
market.
"The diversity of model
requirements within our client base (scope,
scale, complexity, accessibility, etc.) has
fueled our persistent survey and acquisition of
what we consider best-in-class modeling tools.
We have now adopted Vanguard
System as our core tool and strongly recommend it
to professional modelers using anything
else."
Michael Kubica, Senior Scientist, Healthcare
Econometrics
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