RPA Implementation Potential In Pharmaceutical Companies

RPA has limitless potential for the pharmaceutical industry since it can be used to automate both front- and back-office processes. Digital bots can be used to produce documents, transmit data across systems, issue notifications automatically, schedule entries, help fill in records and papers, as well as for reporting, managing, or assuring data compliance. Nearly 45% of the tasks manually performed can be automated for pharmaceuticals, which offers enormous potential for cost savings and productivity enhancement, according to a McKinsey report.

RPA Use Cases for Pharmaceutical Sector

The pharmaceutical industry can benefit immensely from using RPA in the following areas -

1. Manage procedures for clinical trials-: Numerous repetitive tasks are involved in drug clinical trials, including entering of patient data, validation of trial data, and regulatory filings to compliance teams and auditors. To make clinical trial management easier, RPA can automate a variety of procedures, such as:
   • Enter patient data
   • Compare patient records
   • Schedule and notify appointments
   • Management of the Trial File Master (TFM) (e.g. data entry and updates, file transfers)
   • Creation of clinical trial reports
2. Inventory and Supply Chain Management-: Complex regular operations can be automated thanks to robotic process automation, which can increase productivity, save operating costs, and enhance accuracy. The following are a few good examples of the fields having multi-step processes that can be automated:
   • Management of invoices
   • Inventory control
   • Management of purchase orders
   • Process refunds and returns
   • Demand and supply planning
3. Automate procedures for compliance-: The legal frameworks governing the development of drugs must be adhered to and kept current since they directly affect the public's health and safety. In response to the COVID-19 outbreak, Deloitte said that authorities have been regularly changing their compliance policies and strategies to combat the pandemic. RPA solutions can assist healthcare companies in achieving transparent and knowledgeable compliance by:
   • Utilizing web scraping to monitor changes to regulations
   • Determining if internal documents adhere to policies and requirements
   • Submitting auditing authorities' regulatory filings automatically
   • Additionally, RPA bots provide audit trails for every process they perform, which audit teams may examine to produce transparency reports
4. Processing of rebates and chargebacks-: Pharmaceutical businesses can incur huge loss as a result of duplicate rebates, chargeback fraud, and copy abuse. Robotic process automation can be used to automate the collection, storage, and accessibility of data from many sources to increase transparency and accuracy. RPA has further advantages, such as:
   • Cross-compatibility between several interfaces
   • Eliminate mistakes in data gathering and processing
   • The automation of manual activities in payment processing and rebate validation
5. Automate onboarding of suppliers-: The process of gathering supplier information, doing due diligence to evaluate their compliance protocols and risks, drafting and executing a contract, and entering the information into the business's vendor management platform is known as supplier onboarding. In the pharmaceutical industry, a proper onboarding procedure lowers the danger of future litigation pertaining to the vendor's compliance and ensures higher data quality. In supplier onboarding, RPA bots can handle repeated operations to maintain compliance and prevent data inaccuracies. A few of these tasks are:
   • Data gathering from vendor records (e.g. PDFs, emails, contract details) and entry
   • Comparing vendor data from several sources
   • Identifying inconsistencies between procedures and rules in vendors' records
   • Updating vendor information in the software and databases used for vendor management
   • When a contract is authorized or when changes are available, suppliers get emails and notifications

Eastern Software Systems helps you by consulting and strategic recommendations to augment your digital transformation initiatives and optimize returns on investment in new-age digital technologies. Contact us now to have a word with our RPA specialists.

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