From Therapeutic Development to Portfolio Management
Use situational awareness to increase operational efficiency.
There is an entire industry that will tell you the key to success, whatever it is that you are doing or trying to accomplish, is to emulate the military and its elite units. If you train, think, and lead like them, you can become an elite performer.
This is not one of those.
We are not recommending that we try to become our military friends; just learn from them. In this article, we will look at examples of dynamic, complex environments where decisions are made with imperfect information – a ubiquitous military situation – and consider applying a similar philosophy to help life sciences teams succeed.
The Business Case for Situational Awareness
Situational awareness (SA) – how well one's perception of reality matches actual reality – is a foundational, critical concept in aviation, on the battlefield, and in any chaotic, complex situation. Successful performance requires assessing the current state, predicting the near-term situation, and making quick, accurate decisions in dynamic environments.
The technology used to enhance SA continues to evolve, from aviation multi-function displays that overlay multi-source information in a single view, to networked battlefield units, to full Tactical Augmented Reality (TAR).
We explore this concept – augmenting the perception of reality through technology, providing enhanced information for work performance, and testing its performance impact in the context of complex task performance in the life sciences industry. It's not quite augmented reality for tactical execution in the way the military understands it. We overlay information for workers who perceive their worlds through computer screens instead of tactical visors, but the base idea is the same.
Language models acting as AI co-pilots enable teams to access the right information at the right time, facilitating informed decision-making and boosting operational efficiency.
The Importance of AI Language Models
Deploying language models is a crucial next step for using situational awareness in your organization. It follows the established foundational process for optimization and technology implementations.
Language models acting as AI co-pilots enable teams to access the right information at the right time, facilitating informed decision-making and boosting operational efficiency. These models generate concise and pertinent summaries by analyzing data from diverse sources, keeping teams informed about the latest developments inside and outside their organization.
These models can streamline portfolio management in the pharmaceutical industry, particularly when integrated with existing data systems and decision-making processes. By examining market trends, upcoming patent expirations, the competitive landscape, and other relevant factors, AI co-pilots can help you make decisions around acquisitions and divestments. These co-pilots enable the efficient use of resources, ultimately enhancing operational excellence and minimizing costs.
Language models augment workflows that traditionally require human expertise by analyzing vast amounts of information, synthesizing insights, and generating actionable recommendations. By providing a preliminary analysis for every decision, language models can support navigating the intricacies of pharmaceutical operations.
Enabling Customers with Augmented Reality Tools
Preparing for, not falling off, the patent cliff
Between 2025 and 2030, more than 30 key therapies are expected to reach loss of exclusivity (LOE), a projected impact of more than $200 billion. (See "The Next Big Patent Cliff is Coming, and Time is Running Out to Pad the Fall" – Scrip, 4 Apr, 2022).
As more successful, lucrative therapies continue to lose exclusivity, life sciences companies must make critical decisions around allocating their financial and human capital through divestments, acquisitions, and external innovation. While a single business transaction is relatively simple to handle as a one-off project, handling multiple transactions escalates complexity in navigating and managing resources and daily operations.
Investment in R&D is rising – and so are R&D costs. Many companies are turning to M&A and external innovation to fill their portfolios while divesting non-strategic assets, adding operational complexity to organizational, manufacturing, and regulatory tasks. One-off divestments present challenges around finding assets, evaluating risks, and accurately valuing each therapy. Then deals are handed off to the broader organization, often to be executed as individual projects.
If this sounds familiar, consider applying augmented reality to enhance situational awareness across your transaction portfolios and the complicated second and third-order effects. Our team developed tools to overlay real-time organizational information across individual workstreams. This readily available overlay is enhanced by AI's ability to instantaneously digest data and natural language and recommend or offer additional information, tools, or procedures to aid decision-making. This technology can help alleviate challenges and increase the success of strategic divestment.
Augmented reality tools enhance the oversight and management of transactions, decrease the time between handoffs, and speed transactions to completion. It smooths out the inefficiencies across:
- Data transfers
- Regulatory filings
- Clinical trial impacts
- Third-party impacts
- Manufacturing implications
One global customer took a leap beyond technology to embrace innovation across the people-process-tech triad to foundationally transform how they conduct clinical trials.
Life sciences leaders understand the volume of individuals and tasks necessary to successfully run a trial, particularly given the regulatory environment. One clinical trial can involve a hundred different roles, a thousand people, and tens of thousands of interactions for successful completion. Managing a hundred trials is exponentially more complex, with multiples in cost, risk, and chance of failure. Pharmaceutical companies are increasingly using technology to help address these challenges and accelerate their clinical trials.
One global customer took a leap beyond technology to embrace innovation across the people-process-tech triad to foundationally transform how they conduct clinical trials.
With our help, the team developed an interactive, immersive tool that allows all contributors to execute tasks efficiently and effectively for every trial. Situational awareness allowed global teams to work together more seamlessly and new efficiencies enhanced the management of individual trials as well as the entire therapeutic portfolio.
Starting with process innovation, the team used technology to provide personalized real-time information in context for workers to reduce manual process, improve coordination, and enhance oversight for the organization's clinical trials.
Elevate Your Teams With Situational Awareness
Point B uses technology to increase situational awareness for individuals and teams conducting complex operations, translating the military concept of augmented reality into tactical workplace execution.
Clinical trial augmented reality for tactical execution enables:
- Consolidation of tasks
- Intuitive, central access to documents, procedures, training, and support materials
- Efficient execution
- Smooth task handoffs
- Standardization of activities
- Faster onboarding times
- Enhanced activity monitoring
- Reduced cost and risk
- Enhanced strategic alignment
The military strives for near-perfect knowledge of the battlefield with a hyper-focus on what's happening in the moment. Hypervigilance reveals opportunities for victory by seizing and holding valuable terrain. Similarly, situational awareness can help companies continually identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, allowing them to modify strategies, gain valuable market share, and navigate complex operations.
The complexity of both business and war requires informed and trained individuals, multiple analytical tools, and data sources to facilitate operations. Today’s competitive landscape demands technical capabilities that can combine all intelligence into communicable actions aligned with a unified strategy. Situation analysis combined with real-time capabilities provides a new, much-needed path toward operational excellence and competitive advantage.
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