Overview
Pharmaceutical firms have long outsourced functions such as manufacturing, packaging, clinical trials and sales force mobilization. Today, industry leaders also pursue outsourcing to achieve high performance across their businesses. By entrusting outsourcing providers with information technology and business processes, pharmaceutical executives can devote their full energies to delivering current earnings while generating future customer value in core areas such as research and development. Furthermore, outsourcing can allow them to establish consistency and efficiency across sprawling international networks of commercial,
supply chain and manufacturing organizations.
To understand how pharmaceutical companies are using outsourcing to become high-performance businesses, Accenture surveyed 162 senior executives in the health & life sciences industry in the United States, the United Kingdom, France and Germany. This group included executives in the pharmaceutical, medical devices and biotech segments, with the balance of interviewees coming from health services companies.
The study found that 42 percent of health & life sciences companies currently outsource some portion of information technology. But many also enlist service providers to run key business processes, including learning and training (31 percent), supply chain (22 percent), human resources (20 percent), finance and accounting (18 percent), and customer relationship management (8 percent).
Research highlights
The research confirms that pharmaceutical companies pursue outsourcing to help achieve high performance on both strategic and tactical levels. They not only maintain control over business results through outsourcing — they can increase it.
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