Drastically Decreasing Time-to-Information

Picture this: you’re a highly successful college student just about to graduate, and you’ve been recruited to one of the biggest pharmaceutical manufacturers in the world as a rebate contract manager. Not only does this come with a generous paycheck, but you will get to perform work that contributes to the production and distribution of drugs that save and improve the lives of the patients who use them. By analyzing the effectiveness of your company’s medicines and strategically planning the placement of future drugs, you play a vital behind-the-scenes role in helping countless patients. 

However, the scale of your new employer naturally comes with mountains of contracts from the company’s relationships with its many distributors. As part of the job, you spend the majority of your day poring over contracts, page by page, section by section, trying to find relevant data points and entering them into spreadsheets so that you can glean productive insights. Developing strategies based on those insights is probably the best part of your job, but seems like only a minor part of your role due to the amount of time spent on minutia.  

Your highly anticipated first job out of college might not be what you hoped it would be – you might feel more like a data entry clerk than you’d prefer and wish that you could focus more on making a real difference through driving or supporting strategic business decisions. You need a sidekick. A tool you can employ to make a significant impact. You need AI-powered rebate management

AI can extract hundreds of data points from tens of thousands of highly complex contracts almost instantaneously, saving thousands of hours in manual processing time every quarter. Contract managers can spend time analyzing reliable insights instead of manually extracting data points. Furthermore, AI can produce data at a 95 percent accuracy rate, increasing the ability of rebate managers to find commercial or contractual risks by 90 percent.  

Without question, an AI sidekick can increase productivity while decreasing time spent on manual data processing. AI has arrived at the point that, with human supervision, it can complete mundane tasks that diminish the time spent on critical thinking and business development. In rebate management, AI will not replace you – it will make you more productive and enhance your decision-making while you spend more time looking at – not for – data metrics. 

Beyond the benefits of AI-powered rebate management at the employee level, I have seen its impact on the business processes of a major pharmaceutical manufacturer.  

Pharmaceutical manufacturing, while similar to most other global enterprises, is unique given the value of time within the industry. The longer it takes for a manufacturer to develop a drug and place it in the right market, the greater the delay in monetizing the investment in the drug and the more significant the loss of profits for the business.  

Bottom line, if pharmaceutical manufacturers cannot operate at speed, they will fall behind. I have seen an extreme pressure put on my clients’ rebate divisions to not only move an approved drug to market quickly to maximize profits, but to find the pennies that are missed among the highly complex rebate contracts between the manufacturer and its distributors. 

When I speak of finding pennies, I speak of the small monetary savings that are lost when a drug is neither priced nor placed in the market correctly. For large pharmaceutical manufacturers, pennies can quickly translate into dollars, which rapidly compound into thousands of dollars of cost-savings or untapped commercial value.  

The pennies, though, are inaccessible if a contract manager cannot understand the contract environment and connect the information within the contracts to an information management system that grants team members visibility of the proper price-tiering and market placement of a drug.  

This visibility of all contract data allows managers to respond to changes in the market faster and more effectively than they would have been able to by manually looking up details from a specific contract on a case-by-case basis. AI makes this possible by drastically decreasing time-to-information and identifying exactly which pennies are available to leverage, and where they are. 

From my observations, a pharmaceutical manufacturer is most effective when it can operate at speed and scale, matching the cadence of the business operations to the drug development operations. AI has already transformed the ability of manufacturers to develop drugs, and, in my view, we will see the speed of drug production continue to improve as AI technologies become more sophisticated. Now is the time for the business side of pharmaceutical manufacturing to leverage the same asset. 

Some might argue that using AI on internal contracts is risky, but I have to ask: why would you trust AI to make life-altering drugs, but not to look through your paperwork? AI does best when it has guardrails, procedures, and high-quality data with which to work. Employing AI-powered rebate management solutions would do just that, identifying and classifying the contracts and documents in your repositories and accurately extracting quality data with speed and accuracy. An AI sidekick for your rebate management program will not only transform the workload of individual contract managers, but the revenue potential and business function of the entire organization.