Data intelligence industry innovation service media
——Focus on digital intelligence and change business
Among the global pharmaceutical companies, Merck is the existence of gods. When it comes to its star drugs, the hepatitis B vaccine, measles vaccine, cervical cancer nine-valent vaccine, rapid short-acting anesthetics, antibiotic penicillin potassium and other drugs we vaccinate are all from Merck.
In 2022, among the top 10 operating income rankings of global pharmaceutical companies, Merck will advance to fourth place with a total revenue of US$59.283 billion, an increase of 3 places from the previous year.
The reason why Merck has such excellent performance is that on the one hand, its own "hard power" in drug research and development has been widely recognized by the market and patients; The fields include AI medicine, clinical research, patient services, etc., and continuously enhance the "soft power" of serving patients.
Among them, the most noteworthy is that Merck uses digital technology to empower pharmaceutical marketing, continuously improves marketing efficiency, and the sales expense ratio continues to decline.
In a vertical comparison, during the four years from 2019 to 2022, Merck's sales expense ratios were 22.66%, 21.57%, 19.78%, and 16.92%, respectively, decreasing year by year. In a horizontal comparison, in the 2022 financial report statistics, Merck has become the company with the lowest sales expense ratio among global pharmaceutical companies with a sales expense ratio of 16.92%, which can be described as "the most efficient money-spending and best-returning pharmaceutical company."
Data source: Quxue, the performance of the world's eight largest multinational pharmaceutical companies in 2022
So, how does Merck combine digitalization with pharmaceutical marketing, and what is the secret?
At the recently held "Medical and Life Sciences Industry" summit, Chong Jieren, Director of Data IT at MSD, delivered a keynote speech on "Thinking about Enterprise IT Transformation in the Cloud Era". He mentioned:
"Digital transformation is a very effective means and method to continuously connect with our customers. Since 2015, we have gradually moved our digital marketing channels to the cloud, borrowing a lot of professional capabilities of Amazon cloud technology to enrich our platform, whether it is online The content management of online channels, marketing automation, customer scanning code binding, doctor master data authentication, etc., are all built on the basis of cloud services.”
Going to the cloud: the optimal solution for cost, efficiency, and scalability
For a long time, the sales expense ratio of pharmaceutical companies has remained high, and it is the biggest "gold swallowing beast" that devours the income of pharmaceutical companies. How to improve the marketing efficiency of pharmaceutical companies is the most troublesome problem for major pharmaceutical companies. In the past, traditional medical institutions relied on customer visits to promote sales. In 2015, Merck tried to launch the cloud.
"At that time, we tried a very lightweight application. The most intuitive feeling was: in terms of cost, hardware purchases were transformed into cloud resource subscriptions, and the cost was greatly reduced; In this way, snapshots can be restored instantly, improving efficiency.”
As the understanding of cloud services continues to deepen, Merck has accelerated the pace of migrating other applications to the cloud.
In 2020, with the preferential policies provided by the Xuhui District Government and the strong support of Amazon Cloud Technology and other partners, the "Mercedes & Dome and Amazon Cloud Technology China 1.0 Environment" will be created, and the underlying services will be reconstructed. Available, DevOps automatic deployment and other underlying modules realize abstraction and shared services, forming a relatively complete and systematic enterprise architecture.
In 2021, more and more lightweight applications of the digital marketing channel (DMC) will be able to run on the cloud and empower ecological construction.
In 2022, Merck's data analysis cloud platform has grown into a very complex application involving many systems. Based on the global infrastructure of Amazon Cloud Technology, Merck has completed the deployment of the data analysis cloud platform in Singapore.
This year, "MSD and Amazon Cloud Technology China Version 1.0" is being further iterated and upgraded. Once this work is completed, Merck will migrate the entire DNA application to the ecology of Amazon cloud technology to achieve full coverage of the entire application.
From 2015 to now, after eight years of deep cultivation, Merck has finally completed an important step in digital transformation with the help of Amazon cloud technology.
Digitalization: Breaking "Data Islands" and Realizing Cross-Product Collaboration
From the perspective of Chongjie people, enterprises face two challenges when going to the cloud:
One is that traditional software applications cannot realize cross-product collaboration mode.
The second is that in the process of establishing an enterprise ecosystem, there are different demands for service types.
How did Merck solve this problem?
1. NBX: Each process module forms a complete ecological closed loop
Merck believes that digital marketing of pharmaceutical companies is very important to create a customer-centric marketing ecosystem. The company first collects user behavior through face-to-face or online channels, and then sends it to AI and BI platforms through data platform integration to generate suggestions and insights.
This part is constructed by Amazon cloud technology Amazon SageMaker, Stack Function and other components, called FaaS, a module of function as a service, which can help data scientists efficiently generate suggestions for sales teams.
"For example, let's say we held a meeting and invited a guest or speaker from the medical field. We judge the guest or speaker through our DCR and MDM systems . He is an existing and certified The target user is still a new user. If it is an existing user of the system, then his master data doctor code will be bound with the QR code.”
"With the customer's master data, we can communicate and interact with him in all aspects, such as having a better understanding of the user and his needs through the CRM system , and then setting a target doctor visit plan, etc. Another example is at the exchange meeting , he may express his thinking or exploration in a certain aspect, and when he mentions some keywords, we will identify that he may be interested in this field through the AI engine . Suggestions will be sent to sales representatives, and relevant content will be pushed to this guest to deepen his understanding of the product, which may be helpful to him, so as to increase user reach and feedback rate.”
"In addition, the process of holding a conference may involve speaker contracts, travel services, etc., which requires the integration between our own platform and external services. For example, we have API data interfaces with external travel companies to achieve Paperless online data docking, post-meeting invoice collection, etc. are also synchronized from our conference system to the financial SAP system. The whole process is not a single system or application, but an end-to-end closed loop. We will Defined as NBX, the ecological construction is finally completed through digital marketing channels.”
2. Like "Lego" building blocks, construct an efficient, collaborative and reusable platform technology framework
In the process of building an enterprise platform, three types of services may be involved: standard products, external services and customized products. In this hybrid mode, Merck needs more modular and flexible middleware to achieve collaboration between different types of products.
In this process, Amazon Cloud Technology has played a very important role as middleware, helping Merck’s own platform to connect with external services like “Lego” building blocks, which can be spliced wherever needed.
Taking the data platform as an example, Merck has IAAS-based applications, PaaS-based Amazon RedShift data warehouses, and native services for data link management such as secret manager, and Function as a service to achieve standardization and modularization that can be reused functions, as well as a data scientist platform provided by an AI engine based on the combination of modules such as Amazon SageMaker and Amazon S3. By combining these building blocks, Merck can construct an efficient, reusable and collaborative platform technology framework, and finally realize the productization of data services and create a seamless user experience.
Regarding the choice of cloud migration method, Chongjie people believe that there is no right or wrong. Enterprises need to analyze and evaluate according to their own conditions. Direct migration or simplified migration can be used. "In the year before last, we had a project with more than 1,000 data services and reports in data assets. Through collaboration with business departments and Amazon cloud technology, 77% of the simplification was achieved, and the remaining 23% of the content was realized through standardization. Hope that in In the future, we will be able to help users achieve breakthroughs in capabilities, empower business users with technology-oriented capabilities, and improve enterprise production efficiency." Chongjie said in an interview.
From Merck’s practice in empowering pharmaceutical marketing with digital technology, it can be found that the more leading companies in the industry pay more attention to the integration and development of new technologies and businesses. Now that the era of AI technology innovation is roaring, Merck is also actively responding.
For those enterprises that have not yet gone to the cloud, the best time to plant a tree was 10 years ago, followed by now.
Text: Mu Yang / Data Ape
