LEVERAGING TECHNOLOGY AS A STRATEGIC ASSET

The life sciences industry is riding a wave of digital disruption that is changing the way products and services are delivered, shifting go-to-market strategies, intensifying compliance mandates, and reshaping supply chains.For companies operating in this dynamic sector, the pressure to transform and evolve is relentless. As companies struggle to gain a competitive edge, technology can be the key enabler of business value—or the barrier that holds it back. While the mandate to achieve digital excellence is clear, without a calculated, strategic approach to IT planning, your efforts can quickly veer off course.

At BACS, we are well-equipped to help you navigate this rapidly evolving technology landscape. Our team of expert IT consultants will assess your current infrastructure and capabilities, identify opportunities for improvement, and create a customized, long-term digital transformation strategy.

Our depth of talent and breadth of experience in the life sciences sector gives us a distinct advantage, along with our willingness to go the extra mile to make sure every project is done with superior care and attention to detail. With our diverse tool of talent and broad set of capabilities, BACS is capable of handling your company’s complete IT support needs.

BACS works to help remove the chaos and complexity of managing your IT infrastructure so you can focus on more pressing business priorities. We help you take full advantage of the opportunities digital enables, whether it’s growing revenue, capturing market share, or elevating the customer experience.

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While the ability to innovate rapidly can provide an important advantage, the pace of innovation within the life sciences sector can create its own challenges. Not only are IT departments now being tasked with helping to drive business strategy, they are also being asked to deliver results more rapidly. This requires agile, reliable IT infrastructure that can quickly scale up or down to meet shifting market trends.With technology now a fundamental driver of business success, IT must now support an ever-expanding number of internal customers. While big data, the cloud, and automation are helping to boost productivity and improve the quality of decision making, it puts more pressure on IT to support more technology and deliver more specialized technical and business planning expertise.

Most executives within the life sciences sector understand the need for digital transformation and many have started down the path in some form. Still few have mastered all the elements needed for true change. This presents companies with a unique opportunity to gain true competitive advantage by creating a technology roadmap that will help ensure the best approach to upgrading platforms and applications and optimizing business performance.

Fundamental changes in the life sciences market are bringing both challenges and opportunities for how technology is used and managed.

• Life sciences companies are launching new products at a more rapid rate, and in a more diverse range of treatment areas. As manufacturers focus on new therapeutic discoveries, operating budgets remain strained by large R&D budgets, while IT teams struggle to deliver more value with limited resources.
• The rapid advancement of technology is putting additional pressure on IT to drive innovation, improve efficiencies and optimize ROI. The rise of mobile, cloud and other digital technologies open a new avenue of competition among established companies, further intensifying the need for specialized IT knowledge, skills and expertise.
• To capitalize on new and emerging capabilities, businesses much transform both strategically and operationally, while also reducing costs and investing strategically for greater profitability.
• Life sciences companies are increasingly leveraging big data and advanced analytics to gain valuable insights and build competitive advantage. The ability to access and leverage that data is critical to creating customer-centered service models, optimizing outcomes, and driving efficiency.

The forces that have managed to disrupt other markets are now beginning to impact life sciences and healthcare markets. Leading technology players (like Google and Amazon) are beginning to nudge their way into the healthcare space, bringing unique capabilities such as brand recognition, established supply chains and powerful analytical capabilities—all backed by vast financial resources. To position IT as an enabler of success, you need an IT strategy that aligns with your business. That’s where BACS can help. Through experience, focus and discipline, BACS has honed its skills to help life sciences companies make the right technology decisions and identify the best path to success. We work with you to understand your vision and create an actionable roadmap that will allow you to manage and scale your business better and smarter.

BACS provides strategic guidance in several core areas:

• IT Assessment and Strategy
• Technology Planning and Roadmap Alignment
• Business Application Management
• Information Security Strategy
• Budgeting and Resource Planning
• Benchmarking and performance Assessment
• Technology Capabilities and Systems
• Cloud Strategy and Assessment
• Risk Management and Compliance
• Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity

While the life sciences market deals with change on multiple levels, organizations are rapidly creating game plans to stay competitive. Disruption is not all gloom and despair. With the right IT strategy and technology, it can become an opportunity rather than a threat. Your ability to respond deliberately and accurately can make all the difference.

This is where sound technology planning plays a vital role, putting you in position to more quickly adapt to shifting needs or changing business models. BACS relentlessly pushes the envelope in our effort to help you get more from your people, processes, technology, and budget.

We work with you to develop the right technology roadmap with a strategic view towards long-term growth and maximum technology leverage. Our expert consultants understand the complexities and challenges of technology deployment and work to sure your solutions align with your priorities and will scale appropriately.

To survive and thrive in today’s fast-moving digital world, companies must be able to innovate faster than their competitors. Driving innovation at this speed requires a culture that encourages and celebrates innovation.

That’s where partnering with a technology expert can provide immense value, helping you gain an edge and avoiding obsolescence. Your ability to correctly assess the scope and reach of disruption can provide a vital market advantage. Will the impact of disruption reach your market and your customers? Will it bring new value? What impact will it have on your employees, your operations or your service delivery models?

To unlock the opportunities inherent in modernizing core technology, life sciences companies should position themselves around several core business plays.

• Build a cohesive strategy: To compete successfully in the digital age, life sciences companies need an IT strategy that aligns with business priorities, taking into account key infrastructure requirements, risk factors, and lifecycle costs. A well-planned, holistic strategy looks beyond piecemeal technology upgrades and embraces the idea that true transformation is an ongoing journey.
• Drive agility: Upgrade to a flexible, modern IT infrastructure. Open architectures and standard platforms and practices can help accelerate development of new application and services while maintaining compliance with increasingly stringent regulatory requirements.
• Bolster security: Implement robust IT security policies and practices into frontline systems and processes. Make sure your business applications are running the latest malware and anti-virus programs and you are implementing advanced threat detection and data protection defenses.
• Automate management: Automating IT management can help optimize internal resources and IT staff. Network monitoring tools offer visibility into performance and capacity metrics and identify potential vulnerabilities. New advanced capabilities will allow you to automate and centralize patching and software upgrades, along with data backups and restores.

Cloud technology remains a keen topic of interest for life science companies as vendors have begun to create life sciences-specific applications with advanced analytic tools that allow organizations to accelerate development cycles.Although cloud adoption within the life sciences sector has been slower than in other industries, companies are now beginning to leverage cloud resources to reduce complexity and improve operational flexibility. Cloud is increasingly being employed as a way to obtain external sources of big data without large infrastructure builds, enabling access to a wealth of data for use as real-world evidence.

Every cloud deployment has its own unique capabilities and limitations. Although agility and cost savings are vital, moving to the cloud is more about deciding what is best for the organization―not exclusively about reducing costs. Creating a purposed-focused, business-aligned cloud approach should be your top priority.

While the cloud has the potential to deliver substantial business benefits, that doesn’t necessarily mean the cloud is the best option for every workload. Many businesses are finding an optimum balance in a hybrid cloud model, giving them the ability to share data and applications between public and private cloud environments based on specific business needs.

Offering flexible data sharing advantages without sacrificing security, a hybrid cloud approach provides life sciences companies with a number of businesses benefits including:

• Improved scalability: Applications can be quickly scaled as needed to meet shifting capacity demands while improving operational speed, efficiency, and agility.
• Faster time-to-market: Businesses can launch and scale services quickly thanks to flexible deployment models and greater workload elasticity to match available resources with actual demand at any given time.
• More flexible access: The persistent, high availability of a cloud environment helps ensure fully location-independent access to protected applications and resources.
• Enhanced security: Flexible data control enables sensitive data to retain strongest security with on-site protections, while less sensitive data is stored separately in a more protected cloud location.
• Better resource efficiency: With responsibilities for operating, maintaining, and updating IT infrastructure delegated to an outside service provider, businesses can preserve their internal expertise for more strategic business priorities.

Cloud strategies continue to evolve, and many life sciences and healthcare companies have begun moving to hybrid models. As that proportion continues to shift, organizations must create infrastructures that can evolve and scale to meet shifting business needs.

BACS has deep knowledge of cloud infrastructures and managed services environments. We adhere to best practice procedures and principles that serve as the basis of growth forecasts, technology sourcing options, and cost estimates. We evaluate your business needs and assess the level of integration you requirement in your cloud infrastructure, taking into account your available resources, security requirements, and compliance demands.

Your IT infrastructure should efficiently and reliably meet the ongoing operational demands of your business, including the need for corporate stability, service continuity, regulatory compliance, as well as cost efficiency, and resource optimization. With a focus on implementing modern IT infrastructure and platforms, our extensive experience and deliberate approach to cloud planning and deployment help ensure you get a business-aligned, tailored solution optimized for your business needs.

For life sciences companies, the pressure on IT to deliver value and performance has never been greater. However, fulfilling that obligation is no easy task. With our expertise in both life sciences platforms and technology, we can help focus your efforts on IT strategies that deliver maximum advantage. Having helped create and implement IT solutions for more than 20 years, you can count on us to help identify opportunities for improvement, streamline processes, and deploy best-of-breed solutions based on your unique business requirements.

Technology has the power to transform operations within the life sciences industry, helping to engage stakeholders, automate key business functions, and modeling future results based on past performance. With BACS, you can optimize the performance and resiliency of your IT infrastructure while reducing the cost spent on operating and maintaining poorly planned, out-of-date technology.

Our consultants track your performance using carefully defined metrics measured against industry standard benchmarks. By pinpointing poor performing areas and those that are running smoothly, our benchmarking approach helps identify your important areas for improvement and investment.

In terms of driving innovation, the life sciences sector presents a conundrum. While life-altering treatment breakthroughs often occur at rapid speed, the method of service delivery has not kept pace. But change is inevitable and those that come out on top will be those that best prepare for and navigate through the disruption.

No matter the approach, one thing is for sure: progress waits for no one.

For more information on BACS IT consulting services for life sciences companies, please contact us!