In today's technology-dominated business landscape, data has never been more important. It is considered the lifeblood of virtually all businesses, and the pharmaceutical industry is no exception. In fact, pharmaceutical companies are greatly in need of robust data management capabilities in order to make their operations more efficient and streamlined and allow them to dedicate valuable resources to innovation, R&D, and business growth.

Major pharma companies spend billions each year on data acquisition. However, these companies also face internal challenges in delivering durable transformations due to the lack of effective strategies to better manage and integrate data. One such major challenge is data stagnation, which is where they can greatly benefit from the capabilities of Mangabey, a Paris-based data-focused consulting firm for the pharmaceutical industry.

According to Mangabey, many companies are inefficient in buying data, often ending up buying overlapping data sets or the same data, just in different formats. Data that is disorganized or disjointed is next to useless, so it is important for companies to have well-organized data in order to reap its full benefits.

Mangabey works with clients on two types of projects. The first one is data harmonization, which will allow the client's global teams to have a clearer view of how sales are evolving in multiple markets. This allows them to be ahead of the competition and have a full understanding of market growth when there are new product launches, especially across multiple markets.

The first step of a data harmonization project is cleaning. Oftentimes, raw data comes from disparate markets or countries, resulting in different structures and various information that can be displayed in many ways, depending on the data provider. The data is affected by many geographic factors, such as country and language of origin, as well as the granularity of the information. Thus, cleaning is an important stage to make sure the data format is eligible for Mangabey's system.

The next step is quality checking, which ensures that the data is fully cleaned and eligible to be processed and stored in the chosen environment system. This is followed by consolidation, where the data is stored on a cloud tool that depends on the environment of the client.

In the referencing and recoding step, Mangabey's master data management (MDM) team dives into the details and harmonizes each of the lines of data that have inconsistencies or may not be understood by teams due to various reasons, such as being in a different language. The categorization step applies rules or global standards that are already defined by the client's global teams. For example, France might consider a drug part of the diabetes market, while Spain may consider it part of the cardiovascular market. Mangabey then applies the market definition rules created by the client to the cleaned data to ensure it is uniform. The final step, transcoding, deals with other metrics that may differ from one country to another, such as days of treatment.

The second type of project is strategic consulting for clients' procurement teams. Mangabey helps clients centralize and streamline their data acquisition processes, which will allow them to have negotiation leverage to make competitive bids across the different data vendors around the world instead of being stuck with just one data provider. The project's deliverables are preparation and running workshops, interviews with different stakeholders to understand their data acquisition and opportunities for savings, and a final report where Mangabey consolidates its analysis to reduce the purchasing of duplications and overlaps in the client's spending.

Mangabey offers comprehensive services, regardless of the type of project. It holds meetings with the client, collects and validates their requirements, and then develops the customized proposal according to their needs. It then conducts a pilot/proof of concept project with a smaller scope, allowing the client to confirm whether the deliverables are fit for their needs before applying it to a bigger project scope. On the tech side, Mangabey uses the scrum methodology to continuously get feedback from clients, incorporate it into development, release a minimum viable product, and adjust it according to the clients' needs.

The pharmaceutical industry is enormous, with many different verticals creating the need for data expertise to guide companies' operations. Mangabey is constantly on the lookout for new companies to partner with in order to mutually expand their reach across the globe by ensuring that clients are equipped with the best quality of data possible.