Pfizer

Pfizer : challenges and the solution brought by Nomadia

About Pfizer

Pfizer was founded by Cousins Charles Pfizer and Charles Erhart in 1849, this pharmaceutical company has remained dedicated to discovering and developing new ways to treat disease and improve health for people around the world. Pfizer is now the world’s largest pharmaceutical company. Since April 2004, it is listed on the New York Stock Exchange (PFE). Founded in 1953, Pfizer Japan has now more than 5,800 employees. The main activities of Pfizer Japan primarily involve manufacturing and sales of prescription and veterinary drugs for local and international markets.

Key figures

• More than 97,000 employees worldwide;
• 65 production sites;
• more than 200 research and development partners;
• present in 175 countries.

The challenge

Optimizing pharmaceutical sales force activities
The pharmaceutical industry employs medically oriented sales representatives called medical representatives (MR). MRs are the key contacts between the pharmaceutical industry and the medical profession. They have the responsibility of promoting their companies’ major products directly to General practitioners (GP) and hospital doctors. MRs do this via face to face meetings or medical presentations at various types of meetings. All representatives tend to work in an assigned territory. The territory size and geography vary according to companies. Most GP’s /Hospital doctors have an appointment system for seeing medical representatives. As so many other companies are trying to see the same customers, it is essential for the medical representative to be well organized and plan appointments in advance.

The solution brought by Nomadia

TourSolver plans sales deployment
Based on a successful deployment for Pfizer in Latin America, a Geographical Information Software, together with TourSolver was suggested to Pfizer Japan. This enables Pfizer’s representatives to understand, extract and use the geographical content of their customer’s data. This allows both managers and sales representatives to visualize their current market coverage and plan their sales deployment.

Increased efficiency
For a long time, the sales department of Pfizer was looking for a solution to reach a higher number of successful visits while lowering its cost. Pfizer aim to cover almost all medical facilities in Japan. Thanks to TourSolver, Pfizer gets now automatically the best routing and planning for all its medical representatives in Japan to meet a large amount of doctors, nurses and pharmacists every day. As an example, Tokyo area, which has over 1,000 medical facilities, is covered by less than 10 medical representatives while respecting very restrictive requirements. Among those requests, each medical visit should occur during a short 30 minutes time slot while also ensuring that the medical representative is knowledgeable of the product in which the medical facility is interested in.

En plus d’améliorer l’efficacité des délégués médicaux, TourSolver permet un véritable paramétrage des coûts opérationnels (trajet global, par visite…). Pfizer peut ainsi équilibrer le coût global de ses forces de vente en fonction de leur répartition sur le territoire. Avec un nombre croissant de visites, une augmentation des ventes globales et une diminution du coût global engendrés par l’activité des délégués médicaux sur le terrain, Pfizer est confiant sur son développement au Japon et peut répondre aux besoins d’un nombre croissant d’établissements de santé.

“The solution offered by GEOCONCEPT enables us to improve the efficiency of our mobile team by developing optimized tour plans in real-time, taking into account all the geographical data and business constraints imposed. As the health sector continues to evolve, we anticipate continuing challenges. TourSolver helps us respect the different constraints of hospitals and general practitioners while improving the productivity of our medical delegates.”

M. Hasuike, Sales Strategy Department at Pfizer Japan

A better performance of sales’ visit
With the adoption of TourSolver, Pfizer fulfills its medical facilities visiting quota while keeping regular working hours for its sales force. The large amount of optimization constraints within TourSolver, including visiting time windows, possible visit days, customer priority and punctuality respect, helps Pfizer sales planners to be very flexible in allocating appointments to medical professionals while maintaining the target number of visits every day. Thanks to TourSolver detailed cost calculation, each sales strategist can estimate the overall cost of its sales forces. Consequently, this allows higher management that gives the opportunity to upsize or downsize the medical representative teams. Pfizer managed to respect its visits quota and to increase its overall sales but also succeed in decreasing its overall cost.