Less development time, a forced global health perspective and a more customer-centric commercial model means digitisation has accelerated in bioscience and biotechnology.
Businesses think more like regulators, studying inspections and processes from the regulator’s perspective. Compliance with good manufacturing processes (GMP) is likely to return, so it’s critical that bioscience and biotechnology companies evaluate their current methods.
Optimising productivity and adopting new technology is critical to maintaining momentum as pressure eases and compliance tightens. Project Management (PM) services are the cornerstone for achieving this, by helping you become more efficient and leverage new technologies to translate your research into public health outcomes.
The New (Industry) Normal
Although the learning curve was steep, our industry has learned the value of collaborating with regulators and investing at risk, achieving exceptional operational improvements and innovations.
Simplifying the design of development programs, examining internal decision making processes to eradicate bottlenecks and using technology to better predict, automate and control trials are common areas of focus in the pursuit of speed. You may also have learnt the benefits of investing at risk in areas that merit attention, enjoying the interesting pathways that open up thanks to more sponsor engagement.
Companies that can sustain changes in these areas will lead the pack. But optimising productivity and embracing new technology requires dedicated internal time you may not currently have.
Optimising Productivity
Innovative re-designs of development programs (like combining Phase 1 and Phase 2 trials) thanks to regulatory relaxation have helped to simplify processes to make them significantly faster. Organisational agility like this has been common across the industry, but would likely have been slow to occur without improvements in operational efficiency first.
Slowness, red tape and bottlenecks are all too common in bioscience and biotechnology. Project Management services can help bioscience companies avoid costly delays caused by bottlenecks, giving your teams room to breathe. Increased pressure to deliver in a timely manner, isn’t going away. PM services can support you and your teams to focus on their areas of expertise.
Extensive documentation and supply chain management eat away research time in labs. Project Managers can alleviate a measure of this pressure by taking responsibility for some of these tasks. More valuable, however, is finding a PM service that conducts a review of your current methods, and works with you to introduce agile methodologies to your organisation’s ways of working. Businesses that use these methods enjoy improved collaboration and knowledge-sharing between lab members, increased productivity, and reduce overburdened faculty members and slow decision making.
Using a PM service to take care of administrative duties also helps remove duplication of effort and improve turnaround times.
Adopting Advancing Technology
Remarkable technological feats over the last year in bioscience and biotechnology revolve around the effort for COVID-19 vaccines. Chief among these is novel mRNA platform technology, never before used to develop an approved medicine.
From an operational perspective, researchers will use multiple technologies together to generate new insights as new technologies offer exciting paths towards new insights and goals. Some of this will be focused on consumerization of healthcare, and some on improving productivity in research.
Largely these choices will be focused on scaling to meet demand, so companies will become more technology-agnostic to achieve their aims. Because of this, we’re likely to see adoption of relevant technologies to meet immediate needs, until businesses have built internal capabilities.
Areas of focus are likely to be centred on four main technologies, each hitting a specific need within the industry. These are:
AI & Analytics – for automation and enhanced decision making
Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) – a carry over from telemedicine to automate help for the elderly, virtual healthcare visits etc.
Data Migration – to integrate the vast volume of new data
Cloud Content Management – for creating collaborative workflows and speeding engagement, submission, regulatory and governance processes
Until in-house capabilities are present, however, PM services are your best option for delivering business critical digital projects. Project Managers play a major role in aligning business strategy with technology management and identifying, selecting and optimising use of those technologies to deliver projects on time, within budget and to a high standard.
Implementing Change
Improving productivity requires patience, persistence and a vision of the overall picture. Bioscience and biotechnology businesses have goals to revamp the design and execution of trials and how they approach project productivity in the pursuit of increased delivery speed and project effectiveness.
Businesses understand the scale with which technology adoption can positively impact their operations, yet most lack the internal ability to realise those goals.
Project Management services offer an unbiased frame of reference to bioscience and biotechnology companies to help understand where improvements can be made. The right PM service also has the capability to identify and then implement those changes.
Biomatics meet the current gap in the industry for expertise in productivity and technology. We provide professional, clinically qualified project managers to the bioscience and biotechnology industry, helping businesses transform to become leaner and more competitive.
If you have any questions or want to learn more about our ongoing work with the Department of Health and Social Care, UK Biocentre and the Wellcome Sanger Institute, get in touch with our team today.
