8DECEMBER 2023TECH OUTLOOKRE-THINKING THE PHARMACEUTICAL VALUE CHAIN By Ivanna M. Rosendal, Senior Director, IT Business Partner, Ascendis PharmaOur industry is being faced with pressures to develop more innovative medicine at lower cost and accelerated speeds. Being able to adjust to these pressures may mean that we need to rethink how we are organised. In this article I argue that there is an alternative way of thinking about how we are organised, and outline a way to apply this thinking to your company. Pharmaceutical companies are still mostly organised according to functions, grouping people with similar skill sets in the same departments.This supports a waterfall approach to drug development, where one function completes an assignment and hands it off to the business function next in the value chain. According to Christian Born Djurhuus (1), this approach may no longer work. Let's take a ride in a helicopter, and consider what a pharmaceutical company looks like from the highest possible level. Five key Value Streams Instead of grouping activities according to professional skill sets, we can get inspired by Lean Value Stream thinking and consider what are the overarching value streams in a Pharmaceutical company. I would argue that any pharmaceutical company or biotech can be divided into the five key Value Streams outlined in Figure 1 above: Figure 1: Five overarching Value Streams of a pharmaceutical company The figure shows value streams on the left hand side, with examples of departments that may fall into these. Each value stream answers a key question to a specific set of stakeholders in the industry. For example the Innovation Value Stream answers the question "Does the drug work?" and the Compliance Value Stream answers the question of "Will the regulatory bodies approve the drug?": Remove one of these value streams, and you no longer have an integrated pharmaceutical company. Fail to answer one of these questions, and the company will struggle to develop and launch a drug successfully. Understanding the overarching streams in a company helps inform our thinking about what a pharmaceutical company is set out to accomplish, and avoid replicating the default organisational model that we may all have experienced in large pharmaceutical companies. This is a change in how we think about our companies. But to be actionable, we need to get more specific. Ivanna M. RosendalIN MY OPINION
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