IBM ( IBM) announced today that Impax Laboratories, Inc. (Nasdaq: IPXL), a technology-based specialty pharmaceutical company, is using IBM business analytics technology to gain stronger insights into their business and better predict risks and market opportunities.
In such a highly-regulated industry, pharmaceutical companies need a 360-degree view of their entire product development and delivery chain in order to best transform reporting information into business insights, and improve a wide range of critical functions. Prior to implementing IBM business analytics technology, Impax Labs was dependent on IT staff to produce critical line of business reports using information that was spread out across the organization. This approach created an overload of information requests that made it difficult for executives and managers to quickly recognize trouble spots or capitalize on new market opportunities. Once the information was delivered, it was usually out of date, and cycles would be spent trying to determine the accuracy of the data.
With IBM business analytics, business users can now build their own reports and analyses instantly, enabling them to quickly identify performance trends and adjust plans accordingly, forecast sales to ensure top and bottom line growth, and provide senior management with the reports they need to effectively manage the overall business.
Today, users across all departments -- including accounting, sales operations, and manufacturing -- have standardized IBM business analytics into their daily routines, optimizing critical functions such as product development, order fulfillment, inventory management, and long-term revenue planning. For instance:
- forecast managers can now quickly analyze current and historical product inventory levels within an 18-month forecast and shipment history, enabling them to proactively manage customer demand and internal inventory levels, as well as identify potential supply issues
- Sales and marketing executives can track net sales performance against corporate plans on a daily basis, granting them immediate visibility into whether corrective actions are required, such as negotiating specific customer treatments, to improve sales
- C-level Executive Committee can now easily pull together a single view of net sales, profitability and competitive market share information, helping them to determine whether to expand or decrease product production
By eliminating IT bottlenecks and empowering business users to manage performance directly, company executives estimate they have saved over a thousand hours per month in time that would normally have been spent chasing and authenticating information.