How Can Product Data Management Become a Competitive Differentiator for Your Pharma Company?

The ultimate prize for life sciences companies is having comprehensive, consistent and accurate product information. Complete, usable and accessible data enables full transparency into your products at every stage of the value chain. Only with that transparency can you know which raw materials and components were used to manufacture a product, where a product and its components were sourced, and which suppliers were involved in a product’s manufacturing.  

This connection between high-quality product data and the ability to take appropriate business action is indisputable. But as products become more complex, the challenge to get product data right grows more intense. And ongoing industry merger and acquisition activity makes it even more difficult for companies to ensure their product information is top-notch. Getting by with “good enough” or substandard product data is not an option for life sciences organizations, especially pharmaceutical companies. 

That’s why Informatica is announcing new capabilities developed specifically for this market, leading with the Product 360 for Life Sciences solution. Building on our AI-powered data management platform, Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC), Product 360 for Life Sciences adds industry-specific content, configurations and an out-of-the-box data model to help pharma companies quickly, easily and accurately manage their product data. 
 

Go beyond compliance to gain real business value
 

Being able to comprehensively document and trace product data throughout the product lifecycle is unquestionably the best way to conduct your business. 

Of course, you need to comply with global and regional regulations such as the EU’s Identification of Medicinal Products (IDMP), the European Medicines Agency’s Substance, Product, Organization and Referential (SPOR) master data requirements, and the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) standard. 

But you also realize that developing product traceability is intrinsically valuable. Greater insight into the product lifecycle can enhance profitability and increase customer confidence in your products and manufacturing practices.

Yet everyone knows that manually managing product data is a time-consuming, error-prone and lengthy process. By streamlining and simplifying product master data management, our team saw an opportunity to help pharma companies realize significant business value.
 

Get started quickly with ready-to-use functionality
 

Our Product 360 for Life Sciences solution provides an enterprise view of your product data, including a complete picture of products, ingredients and packaging across various systems, business units and regions. Having this insight can help you master and maintain many product classifications, items and variations – changing the way you collect, manage and submit relevant product data. 

The solution includes everything you need to support key product entities, relationships and rules, such as:

• A standards-based data model that supports medicinal product and pharmaceutical products, aligning with regulatory guidelines from IDMP, SPOR, FHIR, and FDA (see the figure)
• Reference datasets based on globally controlled vocabularies and standards, such as SPOR and FHIR
• Predefined match rules for medicinal, pharmaceutical and packaged medicinal products
• Validation rules and enrichment to support multiple global identifiers
• Relationship and hierarchy visualization to enable a view of medicinal product information
• Dashboards and reports with master data management-specific predefined metrics
   

What’s more, the solution helps you support regulatory compliance. It can uniquely identify medicinal products. It tracks packaging, ingredients and substances. And it can enable a streamlined exchange of medicinal product information with regulatory agencies.

The best part is how easy it is to use Product 360 for Life Sciences. We’ve already completed the design work needed to support product management and traceability for various life sciences use cases. All of the capabilities are ready to use out of the box, so you can quickly get started meeting your critical product data management challenges. 
 

Ensure end-to-end traceability with a product data management platform
 

Unlike point solutions that address only certain elements of the product management process, Product 360 for Life Sciences extends the comprehensive functionality of the Informatica IDMC data management platform to meet your needs. The solution provides powerful, industry-specific product data management capabilities that connect to all of your data sources and data-consuming systems. 

It can handle data distributed across multiple departments; differing terminology across regions; data quality challenges due to incorrect, missing, or duplicate data; and multiple controlled vocabularies across various regulatory authorities and jurisdictions. Point solutions simply can’t manage that breadth of functionality.

Product 360 for Life Sciences also gives you the tools needed to develop a higher level of product management discipline. By helping you anticipate and solve difficult product management challenges, the solution can help your business run more effectively. You can protect the business by enabling better traceability for recalls, ensuring the quality of products, and responding faster to supply chain disruption. 

The solution can support your environmental, social and governance (ESG) efforts by helping you create a data hub dedicated to ESG reporting and sustainability. Using Product 360 for Life Sciences combined with IDMC, you can develop a centralized approach to managing ESG data by integrating data from various sources – such as third-party ratings, greenhouse gas emissions, supply chain ratings, board diversity measures and social impact metrics. The data hub then applies data governance and quality rules to ensure data is accurate and consistent, enabling accurate reporting and accelerating compliance. 

To learn more about Informatica Product 360 for Life Sciences, read this solution brief.