for Pharma
Launch
A launch data platform is judged on two things: whether it exists early enough to be trusted, and whether it can carry the 24 recurring reports a commercial team runs on. Below is the calendar, then the inventory.
Why the window is fixed
A solid early ramp puts a medicine on track to hit its numbers. A weak launch costs revenue nobody recovers. And you get one chance at the field's trust: one wrong territory number and the reps run on gut, after which the platform you paid for is furniture.
The calendar
Three phases, clear roles, nothing a black box. We hold the engineering lane, your analysts hold the business lane, and the platform transfers when you say.
Build
Month −18 to month −1
We build the commercial data platform your launch needs. Star schemas your analysts can query, the AI-ready context layer beside them, tests on every table, and observability across every pipeline. Field reporting goes live six months before launch day, so the field learns to trust the numbers before anything is at stake.
Delivers: A production platform six months before launch day.
Run
Launch day through year one
We are in your standup. We ship new datasets in days. We fix what breaks before the field sees it. Your analysts spend their week on analysis rather than reconciling the IQVIA refresh against claims, and your AI tools answer real questions because the data underneath them is real.
Delivers: Launch hit. Analyst queue under a week. Errors caught upstream of the field.
Transfer
Whenever you say
You own it from day one, so the handover is a normal day rather than an event. We transfer to whoever you name: your team, Accenture, or your offshore centre. Eisai moved one of our platforms to Accenture cleanly, because every line of code and every test already lived in their environment.
Delivers: A working platform in your hands, your team trained, our people gone.
Milestones
Week 4
A fast-start star in a data mart on your highest-priority feed, with tests on it from the first build. Analysts start giving feedback while it is still cheap to change.
Week 6
Schema and grain written down, business definitions for equalized prescriptions and payer hierarchy, and validated example queries, so your AI tool answers instead of guessing.
Month −6
The full launch report set in production and in front of the field six months before go-live, which is the only way the numbers are trusted on day one.
Launch day
The first 6 to 12 months set the drug's lifetime revenue trajectory. A weak launch costs revenue that is never recovered, and you get one chance at the field's trust.
Ongoing
A new business question that needs a large new dataset gets a fast-start star, questions back to the supplier, tests, and analyst feedback across a few sprints rather than a quarter.
On the record
1.5
engineers, two years
The entire Cobenfy launch data infrastructure at Karuna, covering 50 integrated datasets. Most pharma companies staff that work with 10 engineers.
7
engineers, $10B in sales
At Celgene, seven of our engineers supported US sales across every brand, with 10 to 12 analysts covering hundreds of datasets without missed SLAs.
18%
of time on data loading
The rest of that Celgene engineering time went to new analyst work rather than plumbing, which is the whole point of automating the loads.
The inventory
A data team of one or two dozen people serves hundreds of sales and marketing users, and each of them has a territory or a campaign. This is what the requests resolve into. Every row needs data from the feeds on the data sources page.
The numbers leadership sees first, and the ones a silent vendor restatement quietly rewrites underneath you.
| Report | What it is | Cadence | Who reads it | Key metrics |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Forecast tracking | National brand performance against the current forecast, built on national prescription audit and forecast metrics. | Weekly | Senior management, brand team | TRx, NRx, units |
| Forecast creation | Developing the forecast itself from analogs, historical trends, population facts, and projected events. | Quarterly | Senior management, brand team, finance | TRx, NRx, units |
| Launch tracking | The executive summary that pulls the key point out of every more detailed report below. | Weekly | Senior management, brand team, home office | TRx, NRx, cohorts, geographic differences, deciles, specialties, targets, activity vs plan, payer performance, top prescribers |
| Claims reporting | Claim counts per product over time, from syndicated claims data. | Weekly | Senior management, brand team, field | Claim volume and mix |
Where sub-national detail matters and where attribution windows shift the answer when a channel feed lands late.
| Report | What it is | Cadence | Who reads it | Key metrics |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Brand team report | Critical sub-national topics in depth, joining sub-national volume, prescriber reference, alignment, targeting, promotional and field activity. | Monthly | Brand team | TRx, NRx, cohorts, deciles, specialties, targets, payer performance, promotional execution and results |
| Brand planning support | Standing up the analysis behind annual brand planning, including drivers analysis. | A few months, annually | Senior management, brand team | Multiple |
| Promotional mix and ROI | Lift analysis and return calculation across the major promotional efforts. | Monthly | Brand team | TRx, NRx, units, financial return |
| Direct-to-consumer | DTC geographic coverage and the lift analysis on top of it, keyed to current alignment. | Monthly | Brand team | TRx, NRx, units |
| Non-personal promotion | Lift and ROI across digital channels, joining promotional data to sub-national volume and field activity. | Weekly | Brand team | Clicks, views, reads, lift |
The reports reps and sales operations live in, and the ones where a territory realignment or a duplicated prescriber costs real money.
| Report | What it is | Cadence | Who reads it | Key metrics |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Field activity | Rep activity against planned activity, joining prescriber reference, alignment, targeting and activity data. | Weekly | Field | Calls, samples |
| Field performance | Brand performance by geographic alignment, which is the report a realignment breaks while every underlying value stays valid. | Weekly | Field | TRx, NRx, calls, samples |
| Pre-call planning | Physician-level views that integrate several datasets into one page a rep reads before a call. | Weekly | Field | Multiple metrics by physician |
| Incentive compensation | Ranking each rep on performance and business logic. A duplicated prescriber splits credit here and the comp run pays the wrong people. | Weekly | Field, sales operations | IC metrics, rank |
| Plan of action and sales meetings | The analysis behind national sales meeting presentations, sessions, and materials. | At meetings | Field | Field activity and performance |
| Target list development | Identifying the most promising existing and potential prescribers from prescriber reference, alignment, and sub-national data. | Periodically | Sales operations | Scores by physician, zip-to-territory |
| Sales force logistics | The periodic data work that keeps the field functioning between the headline reports. | Periodically | Sales operations | Multiple |
Where a specialty brand actually lives, and where a half-loaded dispense feed hides real patients during the weeks that matter most.
| Report | What it is | Cadence | Who reads it | Key metrics |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Payer and plan | Performance across major model groups, minor model groups, and individual payers, which usually needs a bridge file to join. | Monthly | Brand team | TRx, NRx, units, formulary status impact |
| Stocking | Which pharmacies carry the brand, from syndicated stocking data. | Weekly | Brand team | Pharmacies stocked |
| Specialty pharmacy | Stocking and sales across the specialty network, stitched from a dozen or more pharmacy feeds that disagree on what a date means. | Periodically | Senior management, brand team | Dispense, referrals, time to fill |
| Source of business, patient level | Adherence, refills, and switching from longitudinal patient and source-of-business data. | Monthly | Senior management, brand team | Adherence, persistence, discontinuation |
The reports that have to tie out, where "roughly right" is not an available answer.
| Report | What it is | Cadence | Who reads it | Key metrics |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Finance reporting | Accrued financial metrics from finance data. | Monthly | Senior management, brand team, finance | Multiple financial metrics |
| Demand-based P&L | TRx, SKU, pricing, and contracting data combined into a demand view of profitability. | Monthly | Senior management, brand team, finance | Multiple financial metrics |
| REMS | Use within the certified components of the delivery chain, from REMS-specific datasets. | Daily, weekly, or monthly by program | Brand team | REMS programme metrics |
The work that decides whether your analytics team is trusted, and the first thing to collapse when the engineering layer underneath is weak.
| Report | What it is | Cadence | Who reads it | Key metrics |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Analytic questions | Answering questions about the launch and sub-national market dynamics quickly enough to still matter, across whatever data the question touches. | On tap | Extended sales and brand team | Multiple |
Questions
Thirty minutes. Bring the date, the team, and the data sources, and we will tell you what the first four weeks would produce and whether we are a fit at all.