IM Associates
Encouraging a Data-Driven Culture as engine for digital transformation in Pharma Operations

There is much disarray in how pharmaceutical corporations currently run their data management and analytics operations. Many players in the field practice a siloed workflow, where the different departments within an organisation—like sales, marketing, finance, and so on—split up their data and analytics initiatives. This trend often leads to several inaccuracies and unwarranted complications when attempting to effectively and efficiently manage the multiple sources of information across a business and its ecosystem.

“It is essential to get the basics of data right. Companies must build a data-driven culture to make the best decisions,” expresses Bart Bierinckx, CEO of IM Associates, a leading international healthcare solutions and services provider.

Moreover, there is a wealth of data in any health system’s environment and, oftentimes, converting this resource pool into actionable insights for improved performance and a customer or patient centric strategy can be challenging. Healthcare professionals and pharma stakeholders require expert guidance that can help them best manage and utilise their data, all the while enabling seamless technological adoption practices.

In order to support organisations actively competing in the pharmaceutical industry with superior data management, analytics, and consultancy services, IM has dedicatedly focused all its efforts towards delivering highly desirable results. “IM Associates has been founded to offer data-driven value for all stakeholders in the healthcare industry. We invite pharmaceutical companies—human as well as animal health—medical device providers, hospitals, nursing homes, pharmacies, and governmental institutions to question us on their strategic and operational challenges,” states Jurgen De Baerdemaeker, the other CEO of IM.

The company has also identified an increasing demand for improved customer engagement and omni-channel communication capabilities, where the evolution of descriptive to predictive analytics and data science involvement are key areas of interest. “Although everybody in the industry talks about it, real implementations are still rare. This is mainly because of data availability—one needs to keep track of all customer interactions: inbound and outbound.

The first step in this context is often the definition and implementation of a data action plan,” explains Bierinckx. IM’s extremely seasoned staff strongly believes in the notion that a straightforward, self-service analytics function is critical to complement enterprise dashboards and intelligent applications to circumvent the hurdles set up by siloed operations.

Over its 24 years of experience assisting companies in the healthcare arena, IM has developed many robust, intuitive, and highly customisable solutions that cater to the needs of each individual client. IM’s team of data warehouse, business intelligence (BI), and data science specialists, owing to their extensive experience, easily understand a health system’s business operations and is able to quickly study their workflows. After which, from an end-user perspective, IM reverse engineers an analytics solution that seamlessly collects data from many sources and accurately consolidates this massive amount of information in a single location that is future-proof and based on a scalable data model. The idea is to maintain a single version of the truth, where clients are empowered with valuable KPIs for all concerned personnel within a health system. “We also focus on the useability and actionability of all reports, dashboards, and intelligent applications—mobile or otherwise,” adds Bierinckx. IM Associates additionally goes the extra mile with its IM Smart offering: an incredibly sophisticated cloud-based enterprise intelligence platform by the company that streamlines data management operations alongside a full scope of descriptive and predictive analytics functionalities.

To best elucidate IM’s competencies, Bierinckx shares the case study of a pharma distributor that needed an enterprise intelligence solution to support the transition from a supply-driven perspective to a more demand-driven one. “The client was a parallel import/export company mainly focused on buying available raw material products, and only worried about their ability to sell it after the purchase. The general manager wanted to change this mindset and use data to improve their buying and selling behaviours,” he recalls. The company worked with the client to break away from its siloed manner of operation, followed by implementing the changes in culture suggested by the new management. IM deployed its comprehensive IM Smart platform to utilise BI, which gradually combined data collected from many different sources across the client’s professional network. The sales requirements were now transitioned into real-time, automatic purchasing proposals that take margins, production costs and possibilities, and stock levels into consideration. The platform became the daily decision-making tool for the purchasing department, based on info sourced and continuously updated from the various former data silos.

With such strong and intelligent capabilities and offerings, IM is leading the change in data management and analytics for pharmaceutical companies worldwide. Moving forward, the company intends to broaden its presence in the European marketplace while continuing the integration of predictive analytics and customer engagement initiatives in its intelligence solutions. IM is proficient in accelerating its customers’ BI operations with in-depth data management and data warehousing skills, and front-end expertise in PowerBI, MicroStrategy, and Tableau. Combining a long history of serving the healthcare realm with strong analytical skills, flexibility, and short time-to-action, IM delivers consistent, value-added services and solutions that save time and money for its clients, making it an excellent partner to grow alongside in today’s highly competitive marketplace.