There’s a lot of talk about launch excellence in the pharmaceutical world, but what does it actually mean? And how do you achieve it?
Launch excellence doesn’t appear in standard dictionaries, so we asked some of our clients what they thought. A common theme is that launch excellence is the pinnacle of best practice across pharmaceutical launches.
We believe the main aim of launch is to ensure patients gain access to the latest innovative medicines in order to improve quality of life and health outcomes. Whilst ensuring pharmaceutical companies generate the best possible return for their investment and can continue to innovate.
But what does an ‘excellent’ launch look like?
The 5 fundamentals of launch excellence success
Our extensive experience of launch shows there are five fundamentals for any launch to reach the pinnacle. These are:
- A solid ambition and strategy grounded in deep insights, that differentiates you from the competition and provides clarity on where you will play and how you will win
- A commercialization model, budget, and resourcing at the right time and appropriate to the size of the opportunity
- Tactics, plans, and metrics aligned to ambition and strategic objectives, and focus to deliver the required impact
- Timely planning, and a culture of organizational learning and excellence in the execution of your launch
- Strong organizational alignment, belief, and engagement
Understandably, there are many launch excellence processes that support achievement of these fundamentals. Ensuring these are clear, simple, and easily operational, not only allows individual launch teams to better understand what needs to be achieved for each stage of launch but also supports global, regional, and affiliate alignment.
One key element for achieving launch excellence in a company is the sharing of best practices and lessons learned between global, regional, and affiliate launch teams in order to not only optimize the current launch but ensure the next launch is better than the last.
Our definition of launch excellence
As a conclusion, if we were to create summary of ‘Launch excellence’ to appear in the dictionary, it would be:
“Launch Excellence is considered as the state an organisation achieves when all the components reinforcing launch success are well aligned, executed upon, with outcomes clearly defined and shared between relevant internal and external stakeholders. It is a repeatable state meaning applicability across all future launches.”
Next steps
If you would like to enquire about the next steps to create your formula for a successful launch, please contact us and one of our Launch Excellence Consultants will be happy to chat through how we can help.
Contact us today to book a free 30-minute launch excellence consultation.
