We helped an international pharmaceutical company streamline the decision-making process at the regional level. To achieve this, we used our decision agility methodology, which allowed us to ensure the balance of decisions at the different levels of the organization, reduce the number of actors involved, and empower the levels closest to each operation when appropriate.

Context

Sometimes the roles and responsibilities of a decision-making process are diffuse, which generates many twists and turns and ends up affecting the agility of decisions and, therefore, the results. 

Furthermore, in the pharmaceutical industry, the role of compliance is usually very strong and collides with an OTC business, which needs to be faster and faster in order to be able to take advantage of the opportunities that exist today. 

Our client, like many others, did not have a clear definition of which executives should be involved in which decisions and what their responsibility was, either locally or regionally, in the different parts of the process. This diluted responsibilities and, in many cases, the process advanced without having the required technical approvals, which generated setbacks and delays in the validation circuit.

Approach

We performed a diagnosis with our methodology for organizational effectiveness of decisions and worked with the regional directory to define guidelines for the design of roles in all countries, without neglecting critical compliance processes for the industry. 

Taking into account the tensions between the need for scale and reaction speed, as well as the need for the participation of areas with autonomy, it was possible to generate a model that would help make timely decisions at the most appropriate level. 

Then, together with the teams from each country, we designed a local governance map that was aligned with the region and established a common way of operating in all geographies. 

Results

At the end of the project, we managed to optimize each of the key components of a decision process, increasing the level of agility of the organization by 55%. We empowered each decision one more level on average in the structure and optimized the number of people involved in the decision-making process. We balanced regional and local decisions, streamlined compliance approvals and defined common frameworks so that operations could decide within an agreed space (freedom within a framework).