Leadership Perspectives

With over 25 years of experience in various development, management and leadership roles, Mark Jara is a Principal of RxS LLC. He has over 17 years of experience in the Pharmaceutical Industry, and specializes in various industry-related topics, including sample accountability, compliance, pharma sales analytics, sales operations and SFA/CRM tools. Mark speaks at various conferences on the crossroads of technology and the pharmaceutical industry. He was also recently nominated to the 2018 PharmaVoice 100.

Pharmaceutical organizations, specifically operational groups within those organizations, are tasked to do more with less. Years ago, sample management and sales operations personnel focused on a specific aspect of the operational footprint. Now, they need to be experts and support a wider consortium of needs, many times within different verticals.

They can no longer be experts in all aspects of sampling but rather now lean on organizations like RxS to support them with expertise, service and technology that adds not only value to their daily lives but also the strategic forward thinking direction of the organization.

Where do I begin? Interesting with the intent to follow PDMA guidelines, organizations now have a vast array of data at their fingertips. Sampling data can serve much more value than just supporting the PDMA and representative audits and reconciliations. Irrespective of your focus within the organization, the same data can initiate different actionable events from the analysis. For example, a simple Sample Burn Rate report can provide Sales Operations a view to sampling trends and product near term allocations, while for manufacturing, it can provide insight to future manufacturing needs. Data is insight, hence state and federal reporting requirements.

Recent Ohio requirements have put the industry into reactive overdrive. Certainly, pharmaceutical organizations have been reactive to the impact. The impact occurs throughout the work flow. HCP validation/attestation during request mitigation, shipping and reporting to say the least. Let’s not forget the SFA toolset and technical workflows that need to be updated.

I always ask the straightforward question. Are you satisfied with the status quo and simply want to just get the job done, or do you want to be provided with a toolkit based on expertise and focus? Our technical footprint has been built with the latest technology and key learnings from RxS Leadership and IT. This allows us to provide a consultative service approach with state of the art systems and processed that are configurable and flexible. At the same time, being integrated to other ancillary partners that as best-in-class in their respective services. For those organizations that provide a consortium of services, I would ask which service is your primary service and client base focus. Many times these organizations focus on the flavor of the day.