What does the future of pharmaceuticals look like?

We take the pulse of pharmaceuticals today and look ahead to future innovations.

Every industry has had to change rapidly in response to COVID-19. But none has been impacted more than pharmaceuticals. Grayce has been working in partnership with FTSE100 pharmaceutical organisations for the last seven years. We provide high-quality emerging talent to support their digital transformation programmes, along with providing essential COVID-19 support in recent months. Here we share Grayce Analysts' experiences working in pharmaceuticals during the pandemic, as well as what to expect in our upcoming pharmaceutical webinar.

Scrum Master in Pharmaceuticals: Jack Hadingham

"I’m currently working as a Junior Scrum Master within Digital Health R&D at a leading, global pharmaceutical company in Cambridge.

My goal is to support data science teams working within the Advanced Analytics space; improving efficiency, collaboration and instilling agile practices. Teams within Advanced Analytics are working to deliver industry-leading modelling for recruitment, randomisation and retention rates within clinical trials. These models are designed to aid my client in reducing trial length, cost and crucially improve patient experiences.

In my short time in this role, I have already supported many project deliveries, including clinical trial predictive enrolment modelling, and more recently visualisations conveying the impact of COVID-19 on clinical trials.

COVID-19 has significantly impacted the strategic and operational focus of my client. A significant proportion of company resources and efforts have been diverted towards the COVID effort; varying from efforts to develop an effective treatment, to opening testing labs and distributing PPE across the country.

Working among a team of data scientists, I believe the most valuable aspect I bring to my client is a contrasting perspective. I have little experience with data science; my area of expertise centres around business and project management. This allows me to see problems and tasks from a very different perspective. Providing the team with this project management support and guidance I believe is where I deliver the most value. For instance, in my short time with this client I have already made changes to the way meetings are organised and recorded, providing the team with support in areas previously missing."

Supporting finance transformation in pharmaceuticals: Jacob Whitaker

"From day one with Grayce, I’ve been assigned to a leading pharmaceutical organisation. I was deployed into the finance transformation project in the North West. This project is one of the largest finance transformation projects in the world, both in size and budget, spanning the entire company. I was deployed into the Group Project and Management Reporting team as a Business / Finance Analyst. In this team, I was responsible for being a key bridge between the technical teams and the business.

I was quickly able to develop a working knowledge of the new and legacy architecture. Applying key analysis skills of large, financial data sets of new systems including Oracle Cloud financial products and Amazon Web services – Redshift. I played a pivotal role in the deployment of the new group finance systems and the retirement of the legacy systems through data quality and integrity activities.

The program consolidated all the sources into one source of Data, linked directly to SAP, allowing different areas of the business to report and analyse on numbers traceable all the way to the individual transactions. The new architecture has allowed the business to have better visibility of finance data, the statutory reporting times have been reduced by more than 50%, also the cost of running and maintenance of the legacy systems has been reduced.

Like most companies in these times, my client has had to become accustomed to remote working for the majority of the workforce. A promising cooperation with the University of Oxford and my client is paving a way towards a COVID-19 vaccine. Hopefully, the vaccine is going to come to fruition and be in production by the end of the year. The client have coped well in the circumstances and I think that is represented by the soaring share price which is at an all-time high for the company.

The COVID-19 impact has caused a lot of uncertainty in commercial markets. Usually at this time of year, financial analysis is a routine quarterly review of the company’s performance versus what was forecasted. Instead, this year has been a huge effort to try and explore various scenarios related to the virus and how that will look in the financial results for the company. My client was proud to be able to provide excellent transparency at quarterly public results announcements on COVID-19 impacts and it’s thanks to the recent work by myself and the team."

Grayce webinar