Service providers have made the mark of being the life blood of operational and innovation execution in the life sciences industry with continuously maturing capabilities across the value chain. This is driven by the incessant journey up the value stream, leading the adoption of emerging technologies and driving bold innovations.
- The entire life sciences value chain that includes research and development, supply chain, sales and marketing, pharmacovigilance and regulatory has attracted growing service provider participation for many decades. However, the strength of the capabilities that they have been bringing to the market for the better part of the decade has shown a new level of sophistication, that transcends the delivery of widgets to being the purveyor of health and wellness outcomes. This strength manifests in service providers being very mature in supply chain, and sales and marketing capabilities while not far behind on the other dimensions of the value chain.
- For the longest time, service providers focused on administrative functions that were transactional in nature, whose metrics of success were defined by tactical measures like average handle time or number of errors in a process and so on. However, with the growing confidence from maturing capabilities, service providers have been steadily moving towards participating in the science, research, and innovation. Consequently, they are beginning to embrace strategic metrics that include financials objectives (value-based contracts), go-to-market (regulatory) and consumer health outcomes (clinical trials).
- The challenges that the life science industry focuses on is one of life and death. To address such a heavy responsibility, there needs to be an ecosystem approach that optimizes the best, multiple stakeholders have to offer. At HFS Research we are shinning a light on the attributes of that OneEcosystem, a construct that we are seeing service providers making a lot of progress against. We expect that continued progress will see service providers scale new levels of capability maturity.
