eScience Boosts Pharma Sales Efficiency with Automated Report Generation on AWS

The highly-competitive healthcare industry demands real-time tracking and prompt updates of critical data. Without timely and critical information, sales teams will not be able to make informed decisions, ensure resource management and inventory control, affecting overall sales productivity.

Medical or sales representatives must juggle multiple tasks, from submitting computed KPIs, monthly coverage plan (MCP), call or coverage reports, to sending an inventory of their samples to their district managers. Inefficiencies in this process reduces productivity, or even create inventory issues, potentially resulting in stockouts or overstock situations that impact the consumers. At the same time, evolving client needs also demand continual innovation and rapid feature delivery.

eScience recognized these challenges and sought a flexible, scalable, and cost-effective solution while maintaining stringent service level agreements (SLAs) of 99.99 percent.

SFE, built on AWS, bridges these gaps by offering a centralized, dynamic platform that delivers real-time updates and automates report generation. With this mobile solution, medical sales representatives can now streamline operations to improve sales productivity, and respond promptly to evolving client demands—from technological integration with existing infrastructure, to regulatory compliance and more.

With SFE, eScience redefined how pharmaceutical companies and their sales representatives monitor field activities, including crucial metrics, coverage reports and inventory. Utilizing Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) for a robust and high-performance compute infrastructure to meet rigorous business demands, sales representatives can now automatically generate and submit reports through SFE instantly. This marks a substantial improvement from the previous timeframe of 2-3 weeks.

By deploying Amazon EC2 instances across multiple availability zones, the company also achieved near-zero downtime for SFE and upheld SLA compliance of 99.99 percent. Furthermore, SFE's offline functionality allows eScience to optimize instance types without sacrificing super-low latency requirements. eScience's customers can seamlessly access data on their devices during peak periods, ensuring a consistent and smooth experience.

By running SFE natively on the cloud for on-demand scaling, eScience did not have to manage its own physical hardware or account for idle computing resources. As a result, the company saved over US$125K in annual costs.

The company also used Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for its secure and scalable data storage needs. With this, eScience could efficiently store and protect any size or type of data, and configure data access to meet the needs of sales teams in the field. Additionally, medical sales representatives could securely upload and access large files on the cloud through SFE.

With Amazon Cognito, a centralized system that secures user identities and manages confidential data access, eScience streamlined its web and mobile app access management. Additionally, the company bolstered its cloud security and operational efficiency using AWS Identity and Access Management (AWS IAM) and Amazon CloudWatch. AWS IAM controls access to resources, while CloudWatch improves security by monitoring security logs and metrics for potential threats.

Finally, eScience deployed AWS Lambda to automate tasks such as sending emails and processing data, and using Amazon API Gateway to manage the communication and delivery of these tasks. By reducing manual processes, eScience helped its customers save up to 7,500 manhours per year, time that could now be redirected towards enhancing services for its stakeholders.

“By leveraging AWS, we tailor SFE to evolving customer demands, benefiting from a robust and scalable foundation. The reporting automation not only saves valuable time for customers but also substantially enhances operational efficiency. This enables us to scale performance in alignment with client needs, adhere to strict SLAs, deploy updates rapidly, reduce costs, and bolster security—ultimately elevating the value we provide to our customers," said Ricky Dagelet, Chief Executive Officer, eScience.

eScience aims to migrate its applications and services to a serverless infrastructure by mid-2024. This transition is to expedite application deployments and enhance cost efficiencies for future operations.

To meet SFE’s growing user base and application workload demands, the company is also in the process of containerizing all SFE applications. This will allow SFE to run more efficiently and increase its compatibility across a wider range of devices, operating systems, and IT infrastructures. Looking ahead, eScience intends to process all dynamic field reports through Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), a fully managed container orchestration service that helps to effectively deploy, manage, and scale all containerized applications.

Furthermore, to elevate user experiences and overall software integration within SFE, eScience plans to incorporate Amazon QuickSight into the solution. This integration will cater to diverse analytical needs by offering interactive dashboards, paginated reports, embedded analytics, and natural language queries—streamlining access to a single source of truth. By leveraging unified sources of data, field sales teams can make informed decisions by exploring and interpreting information in an interactive visual environment.

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