About
Founded in 1929, Ipsen is a global biopharmaceutical group dedicated to improving lives through innovative medicines in Oncology, Neuroscience and Rare Diseases. They also have a well-established and successful Consumer Healthcare business. Ipsen sells more than 20 drugs in 115 countries and have a direct commercial presence in over 30 countries worldwide. Ipsen’s 5,400 employees are based around the world, including 3 R&D centers and 8 industrial sites.
The challenge
Ipsen is a global biopharmaceutical company currently going through a strong momentum of growth. In 2017, total sales exceeded €1.9bn with 75% growth in North America and double-digit growth in Europe. Global partnerships are critical to achieve this transformation and have become the most important driver in the next phase of growth.
The company’s strategy is to invest in business development to build an innovative and sustainable pipeline and to maintain the growth momentum of the business. Ipsen leverages innovative deal structures ranging from early to late-stage assets. Implementing new solutions to progress towards excellence in their partnering process is therefore key to Ipsen’s external innovation model.
To support their partnering activities, Ipsen had already implemented an internally designed Sharepoint-based solution for all the partnering functions, External Innovation, Business Development and Alliance Management. However, this solution proved difficult to use and to tailor to everyone’s needs.
The solution
To optimize their partnering activities, Ipsen first merged all their partnering teams, i.e. External Innovation, Corporate Business Development and Strategic Alliance Management, into one single department. In parallel, they looked for a common tool to support the team in the partnering process all along, from identification of partnering opportunities to alliance management. Inpart’s Partnering CRM appeared as the best off-the-shelf solution as it is tailored exactly to cover the end-to-end partnering process and can be implemented rapidly.
Having decided to use Inpart’s Partnering CRM, the implementation work quickly started. Inpart’s Customer Success Managers collaborated closely with Ipsen to adjust Inpart’s partnering solution to be a perfect fit and to help Ipsen reassess their processes and requirements.
“The Inpart Team has a huge amount of expertise in creating efficient partnering processes. Thanks to them, we have improved and refined our processes and the way we work.”
SDSenior Director, Head of External Innovation Europe & AsiaIpsen
The implementation process included transferring Ipsen’s historical data over to Inpart. By migrating the data, Ipsen not only kept all of their existing corporate memory, but they could leverage it in Inpart from day one.
The result
Inpart is now an essential part of Ipsen’s partnering process. It is not only a repository of all partnering activities, past and present, but also a tool fully integrated to the partnering process on an everyday basis thanks, for example, to its connections to Outlook, to key partnering conferences such as BIO, and to Clarivate.
By using Inpart, the Ipsen Business Development team can easily work together despite being spread across the globe, with offices in the US, Europe and Asia. Additionally, they collaborate better with other externally facing teams, including the Primary Care and M&A teams. For example, the Business Development team shares with the M&A team what they know about other companies, such as their history of interactions and why they chose not to pursue an opportunity. The M&A team, on the other hand, alerts the Business Development team to any interesting opportunities they come across. As a result, both teams work faster and with higher quality information sharing.
Furthermore, the Business Development team is planning to use Inpart to improve how they communicate about their activities with the rest of the company.
“Inpart changed the way we do Business Development. It helps us to better communicate and report on what we do as a team. We can quickly create and share reports on our activities, such as the number of opportunities we are looking at, the key decision-making steps, what meetings have taken place and more. It’s a must-have for us now.”
SDSenior Director, Head of External Innovation Europe & AsiaIpsen
The reporting also enables the Business Development team to further boost their process efficiency. They can analyze information such as how many deals they signed, how many opportunities they looked at to achieve that many deals, how long it took them to make a decision, the efficiency of their triage in terms of percentage and time, and more. Equipped with such information, they can easily highlight areas for improvement and maximize their impact.
