[Music] [Qusai Mahesri] All right. Guys, we're going to get started. How's everybody doing? One hour before happy hour. So I'm going to try to keep you guys awake.
So Revolutionizing Pharma Content Velocity and MLR with Automation & AI. Wow! That's a mouthful. Who the heck came up with that? Joe, was that you? Jeez. All right. How many people know what MLR is? Okay, you're in the right session. Thank God. I was going to say how many know what AI is? Nobody. Okay if you guys are thinking I'm going to tell you this amazing story about this agentic AI which has AGI that's going to do MLR in one day.
It's not happening.
Okay. So what we're going to do is have a fantastic panel. So I'm going to just talk for about five, seven minutes, kind of frame what the problem is, frame the solution, then you can go away.
So we'll frame the solution, talk a little bit about what is happening today, what is available today. And then get to what are these great folks doing with automation and AI in that content supply chain for pharma. Okay, we ready? All right.
Sorry, your content supply chain for marketing materials is broken.
You're spending millions without realizing it. You've got weeks before you can launch new campaigns just because of many delays, not only MLR. Manual handoffs between AEM, Veeva, compliance risk, delays, different channels doing different things. I could go on and on and on.
How many people agree with this? Are they seeing it? Yeah, pretty much all of it? Anybody solved the problem yet? Andy? I was going to say, anybody to solve the problem, please come up on stage because we'll come down and listen to this.
So that's the problem. I mean it is broken in many different ways. And we're talking about just mocking materials here but so what can we do? Right? How do we go from chaos to intelligent? Right? So we can auto-tag version control, do some compliance stuff within AEM before it's submitting to Veeva. We can automate the MLR submission process into Veeva today. We could use one-click content to basically use, whether you use modular content or not, but even if you're using experience fragments, you could use all of this in different channels very quickly.
And you could have a single source of truth between marketing and regulatory systems. All of this is possible today. Do you agree? Some of you guys will say yes, some of you probably not.
Any questions so far? No? Okay. Just a little bit about us. Sorry, I forgot to introduce myself. Qusai Mahesri, I'm the CEO of Xpediant Digital. We are now part of Qualified Digital. So if you hear-- Thank you. Thank you.
If you hear Xpediantly Digital or Xpediantly Qualified, they're talking about us.
So we've been in business, what, 23 years. And for the first 10 years, we were purely horizontal. We were in the portal content management space. And then we got into the pharma and regulated world and recognized that there is this gap between marketing systems and MLR systems and started building out our toolset. And I'll talk about our toolset a little bit. But then, as you can see, most of our current clients are really in the life sciences and regulated industry space. So Charter is really for both companies to become a leader in solving the whole marketing ecosystem.
So when we saw this problem we said, "Wouldn't it be cool if we could automatically generate MLR submissions?" Create this PDF that Veeva can ingest automatically. We don't have to do this exporting, ingesting, losing and getting compliance risk, things like that. And so that's when we came up with XpGenerator. That's the one in the middle. And so that with a tick of a button can, no matter how complex your website is, it creates your MLR submission package.
And then we said, "Oh, that's cool." We're seeing millions of dollars, thousands of dollars. So what about just actually integrating and by syncing between AEM and Veeva? And so we thought, "Okay, we'll build this platform between AEM and Veeva." And that's how XpConnect came about. So today when we sell XpConnect, XpGenerator actually comes within it. That was great. It was all working for websites and everybody was loving it. And we said, "But what about all the other channels? What about IVAs?" Because most customers spend a lot of money on IVAs. What about emails? What about banner ads? We said, "Okay." So we built a set of templates and components that we call XpOmnichannel and we sell that as an accelerator package which clients basically take over and then extend.
So with that we were able to solve some of those things we were looking at in the earlier slide. Is being able to do omnichannel all with one offering platform which is AEM.
Able to generate, automatically generate MLR packages and doing a lot of stuff. If you think about the the supply chain, this is one piece of it between AEM and Veeva. And today I don't want to just spend time on this, we want to broaden that and say, "What else is everybody doing?" Really let's be a participatory in this. We've got a few questions for the panel but then we're just going to go straight across the whole content life cycle.
Questions so far? All right.
Cool. So let me introduce. I'm going talk a little bit about my history with this gentleman and then I'll let them introduce themselves, tell what they're doing currently. So, Mehul, I've known for many years at Novo Nordisk. He comes from a very technical background. But in the last two years, they have done a complete transformation of the content side of the house of actually how do you find the content, how do you find it, how do you author it. So they've gone through a very, very intense transformation process. And so hopefully he'll give us some insights to that.
Derrick, actually agreeing with Fresenius, is an interesting company because they have a pharma side and they have a med devices side. So he has to think about things holistically.
How many people in pharma? Most of you. Anybody in med tech, med device? Okay, a few. So med devices, generally, the FDA approval is lighter but they have a lot more content. And they have IFUs that they have to worry about. So there's a PIM component that they have to think about. He has a very holistic view about that and has some really great ideas to talk to us about. Joe George, most of you know because he's a speaker almost every Adobe Summit that I've been at. And congratulations by the way, AbbVie won the Adobe Experience Maker Award this year.
Just hot off the press. Yeah? Fantastic. All right, so with that, Mehul, why don't you tell us what you do and kick us off? [Mehul Amin] Yeah, sure. So my name is Mehul. I'm obviously with Novo Nordisk. I've been with the company for about 13 years and about nine of that in that content space. And recently in the last three years, I've moved over to the business on the omni side and now in operations. So I'm heading up the content supply chain team. And obviously, as you said, we started a digital transformation across the organization, moving to the cloud and fully having an orchestrated Adobe stack. So looking forward to this panel with these great guys. So hopefully you guys find it entertaining.
[Derrick Greene] Hi, everyone. Super excited to be here. My name is Derrick Greene. The company that I work for is Fresenius Medical Care. It's a global company. We strive every day and we're dedicated to improving the lives of our patients through our products and services. I've been with the company now for about 10 years and I have many roles, but this is the one I do enjoy the most because I love innovation and solving problems.
But my role is pretty much managing content and operations and we are, I would say, in the middle of our digital transformation. And I'm hoping to have a great discussion here and to provide some point of views. Thank you. [Joe George] Thank you, Derrick. And finally, Joe George, so to Qusai's point, yeah, we were very proud as AbbVie to win the first time Adobe's Experience Maker Award. So super excited about that. And again some of my team members are here. So proud of them and the work that we have done. I'm super excited about this topic because for me, I came in from a non-pharma background. So I've been with AbbVie for about seven years and I came in from a high-tech, completely different industry. So I did not know some of the things that we as healthcare life sciences pharma deal with, which actually was a blessing in disguise. And we've been able to do a lot because we were able to think outside the, if you will, pharma box.
And would love to see where our conversations go today and happy to be here. Thank you for having me. Great, thank you. So I have a few questions I'm going to ask them but please raise your hand or just a small enough room here that you can come up front and ask the question. So the first question I think for the panel is in today's time what AI and/or automation tools are you using in your content supply chain for marketing materials? Joe, you want to go first? Sure. So I would say it's still early for us. I mean we are doing a lot of different things. I mean content supply chain is a new concept as well. I think the first time probably we heard was just in the last couple of years. Maybe at Adobe Summit, maybe at some of the other marketing summits or tech summits that you've been part of. So I think we all know what it takes to look at holistically our supply chain and just looking at those three words itself, I think there's a lot in there, from the start, from the inception, from the concept, all the way to production and then even expiration and end of life.
So I'm super excited about what AI is bringing and what you even heard this morning at the keynote with the possibilities that tools like Adobe Ecosystem AEM. I mean, there's a lot of other pieces in there as well with the agents that's coming up. So for us, we are still looking at all of the different possible tools out there within the company itself. We are actually looking at Microsoft as a partner and so we have rolled out our own version of AI internally for internal employee use cases as well. And then we have partners with marketing, with our internal stakeholders. We're also looking at other different concepts of what can we do now that we have this amazing new technology. A lot of proof of concepts are going on from that perspective and we are starting to see some early gains in terms of velocity impact, efficiency impact but still I would say in the proof of concept pilot phase I would say. And especially from a BTS and a tech perspective that gives me an opportunity to run some pilots and POCs whether it's with Adobe or with other partners and other software as well, which I'm super excited about.
Awesome. Yeah, thanks. I would definitely have to agree that our use of AI is in its infancy. But for me to present to you how we're using it, I guess I would have to talk a little bit about our challenges and start there.
And how we use AI to solve those challenges. So one of our many challenges that we have is developing content.
Our whole goal is speed to market. I think everyone here can agree to that. In particular, we do have a in-house creative studio and they do a lot of our designs for assets. So we have been using Firefly and that has been advantageous to us as far as speed to market and our creative views.
We are looking to see exactly how quick. We haven't done a complete analysis, but we've saved probably a good week or two using Firefly at this point which is tremendous. We have tons of content just like you going out either internally or externally and it's very fast moving. So Firefly has definitely been key when it comes to AI.
Our other challenge where we, again, looking at assets probably towards the distribution storage and it could also be on the front as well, the planning, is once we have this asset, we have to tag it. And tagging takes a tremendous amount of effort.
And so we have been using auto-tagging as well using AWS services to do that. And a while ago you saw Veeva there and we're using that AI capability to do that. So we're able to tag 500 assets in a matter of minutes and that's saving a ton of time. You too may have a small team and so we're always looking for efficiencies from that end to make sure that one, yes, we're getting our assets compliant. We're going through the MLR review. But after that, we want to make sure we're able to retrieve them effectively as well.
So right now, we're also looking at from an MLR perspective, there's some capabilities out there that we can use for claims in particular. Claims hopefully is an important part as well. And identifying once we have created our claims library, how can we use AI to actually generate additional claims that we didn't think of before. So we're also looking at partners. Veeva is one of those partners as well that is able to allow us to not only leverage their AI machine learning but also customize that machine learning. So as you'll find out when looking at AI, okay, it's machine learning, you're stuck in this block. For example, the color red or blue I should say. Well, my logo may look blue, but it's not blue.
So it's these little nuances that I think, yes, AI machine learning, but also combined customizations is going to help us with our MLR process when it comes to claims. Because we could talk about MLR and claims all day, but that's a little bit of some of the challenges that we have and how we're looking at AI from the front end and also from the back end as well.
Yeah. I mean, I think I'm with you guys on the infancy of it. We launched our content supply chain in the Q4 of last year. So what we're really trying to do is get our foundation set up and then get ready for what AI can bring for us. So some of the things that we're focusing on are smart tagging. For example, making sure our assets are all in the right folders, they're searchable, our agencies, our brands, and our authors can all find them. We're also implementing our content supply chain within Workfront to make sure that our workflows and tasks are assigned to the right people, which then turns and brings visibility. The idea is to bring the entire organization along this journey by providing that visibility into the content supply chain. So that when we do have the opportunity to turn on AI for certain things, that it's not just an operations thing or it's not just a brand thing, that all teams are involved in it. The operations teams, the IT teams, the MLR teams, that they understand the nuances of what AI can produce for you and where they need to be involved.
So I would think and then some of the other automations we have is with the XpConnect tools. So we started to bring all of our content into AEM, or IVAs, or field triggered emails, and our websites, obviously. But then how do we get them from one system to another? Right? If we are going to AEM and the source system is Veeva, then we need to be able to do that seamlessly without having to have handoffs, metadata files that need to be there. So I think for us at Novo Nordisk at this point in time, it's really just setting the foundation and getting the things that we know are key for AI. Getting them in place, getting the organization onboarded, getting the key players in those tasks onboarded, and the change management completed, so then we can figure out how we can incorporate the GenStudios, and how we can create variations of content, and get them through MLR quickly. We don't want to become a bottleneck in the sense that we can create content quickly, but then you have a slower MLR process. That doesn't do anybody any good. Or we can have GenAI or GenStudio that's basically creating multiple variations of something, and then you're just choosing one of those to take to MLR. That's not going help us. So I think laying the foundations about how you're going to work with the rest of the organization is going to be super impactful of whether you're successful in incorporating AI to anything you do. So I think from Novo Nordisk's standpoint, that's how we're looking at it. We don't need to be first to it, although it would be nice as long as we get all of our ducks in a row.
Can I add to that? Yeah, please.
We've spent considerable amount of time, not a lot of time, but considerable thought I should say on, when to use AI and you brought up a good point.
It's good to have your processes in place and your people in place. I would say the term crawl, run, walk, think about that. Take your time. Yes. AI is the new shiny object, but you have to have those SOPs in place. You gotta have those work instructions in place. And then you have to ensure that all of your users are up to par to and understand the different nuances of these processes as well. Because they too can get overwhelmed. I know I mentioned earlier that I was all for innovation, yes. But as to my friend here to my right has indicated you have to bring everyone with you. I just want to say I agree with that. That's a good point. Fantastic. So I think, Mehul, you brought up a point about omnichannel. I'd like to ask the other two panelists, what are you doing as far as an authoring platform goes for all your channels? So whether it's IVAs or emails? Joe, you want to take that? Yeah, I can start with that question. I think our challenge, if I look at the calendar previously over the last six, seven years, we even did not have any a unified process of creating content, managing content just for websites.
So which was an opportunity for us to look at what do we need to do in terms of the various different types of brands that are actually part of our core business from a pharma perspective. What are they doing? What is the current processes in terms of managing content creating assets? And again, we were not talking about content supply chain during those days, but again looking at all of the different processes and they were all, I think, somehow magically things were coming all together. But I think the challenge I'm sure pretty much every one of us has faced that.
When you have so many different pieces of what we call today as the content supply chain, if you don't have a coherent way of managing that, how do you even know? Where do you start? Who starts? It's like a relay race. The relay is going on and you have multiple people basically getting the baton. But imagine now, you don't know which stadium you're part of sometimes. Just a different track, not stadium. Yeah, or a different track. Think about that. So we started our journey from that perspective. So thanks to our business and our IT leadership, they were in one of these kinds of sessions about seven, eight years ago where they realized that there needs to be an investment. We didn't have all the answers like today. We don't have all the answers of AI. It's changing as we speak. But at that time and they made a decision that, "Hey, we need to have a unified content strategy." At least think of it from a digital transformation perspective. Let's build our own content management strategy. And that's started our digital transformation journey in terms of looking at major brands and basically, leading the way and telling our partners, our internal partners and our external agency partners that, "Hey, we have invested in this content management strategy and here's the tools, here's what we're going to do. We don't have all the answers but let's start the journey." So I am proud to say that we-- I think our leaders made a great decision and it was a risky decision if you think about it.
As AbbVie, we are in multiple therapeutic areas, different types of medicines and products that we deal with. But we made a decision that, "Hey, there's an opportunity here," and that's what we did. So we unified and we invested in it. It took us a few years to get to the stage but today all our major pharma brands are on this unified content management platform which we internally call as AbbVie Digital Marketing Platform, ADMP, which was a huge success for us. Now we are looking at other opportunities. As we look at other channels, we are saying, "Hey, can we now think about maybe these content strategies or content platforms, maybe unique, based on what channel you are dealing with social media, email, so on?" But is there an opportunity again for them to talk to each other? So we're starting to look at those options as well and now we have technology advancements that allow us to have those handshakes. So the story is not complete yet, but it getting to a point where with content supply chain and with the strategies both on the business side and on the technology side, we can now have a content supply chain that actually is handshaking with each other more seamlessly and more coherently than ever before.
Okay, thank you. Derrick. Yeah, so when it comes to publishing, a lot comes to mind.
It's not just the tool.
The way we think about it, Fresenius Medical Care, it's about where the content is actually coming from. And this was an important part for us, because there's tools out there to publish. And yes, we do use AEM to support all of our websites. But for us, it was how do we know where the source of truth is coming from. That's the key. And I think some of you would agree that you may have folks that are still storing their assets under laptops, OneDrive.
So we looked at where the assets was coming from first. And so what we did was we consolidated all of our assets. We're still in the process of doing it, by the way. Like I said, we're in the middle of our journey. But we have decided on one global, we call marketing asset management platform, which is Veeva. And from there we have integrated AEM. And this is allowing the control of our assets. As Qusai mentioned before, I have to not only think about our services part, which is low-risk, but I also have to think about our pharmaceutical and our product side. And so as you know these systems have to be controlled. And yes, we do use Workfront for review and approval, but we know that this information in particular is high-risk. And so we have to make sure controls are in place. So having a centralized digital asset repository was the most important thing prior to even thinking about how we're going to publish. Because our creative guys, our content author guys, they just take the asset. They're just... "Is it approved?" "I guess so." They just take it, then they just put it on the website. I know for those guys who do that. I know it's not as simple. But I don't want to downplay that role. It's a very important role. But from my standpoint, it's about controlling and lowering the risk for our clients before it goes internally or externally. So with that said, we use AEM Assets to manage all of our websites. And the controls that we have therein are we don't have any rights management controls in AEM Assets. But what we do have is version history. And that version history is maintained via Veeva. So anytime there's a change, an update, and it's really real-time, it goes into AEM. You can actually manage it fairly well from there so that the content authoring team, they understand that they're using the most latest, the most compliant asset that there is. So that was the most important piece of when we think about publishing. From an email standpoint, we utilize Marketo as well. We haven't done any integrations yet with Marketo. We are actually looking at an integration between Workfront as well as Marketo. I do a lot of fusion work myself.
But we're looking at that as well and see what type of efficiencies that we can gain from that integration. We do also have an integration between Workfront and Veeva. And you say, "Wait a second, how do you do that? How do you initiate a MLR approval workflow in Veeva?" And so with infusion you can actually do that. You can actually connect the two systems. And again for us it's about controlling the asset and lowering the risk from start to beginning. So yeah, you can develop, you have a pre-approval in Workfront and then the marketer is able to push a button and send it to Veeva to go through a complete MLR process. And that process is bidirectional. So thereby maintaining our controls within one platform again. So yeah. Thank you. Great. Thank you. So, guys, there is still space up in the front. I hate to see all these people standing. So please come forward. There's the seats here. There are three seats here as well. There's a bunch of seats here. Please come forward. Yeah.
Qusai, if I can add something to the previous question. Yeah. Yeah. Please go ahead. So one of the other things is especially from a technology perspective and this comes a little bit easier to me because I came in from a global organization responsible for tech that is global in nature and then localized for the region's demands. So we are looking to Derrick's point, we are also looking, not just from the content management side of things, but the asset management, whether it's workflow management. We are thinking about it more holistically and truly like an enterprise. So going back to what I previously stated, we don't have to do things differently just because it's a different therapeutic area or a brand that we support or a particular franchise. So that helps when you have a center of excellence model from a tech perspective especially who actually thinks about these and then can actually partner with our business stakeholders, digital marketing professionals as well as marketing teams and guide them and leverage that if we have successes in certain area in terms of how we manage a content strategy or publishing processes, or even content-- We could actually then share that with another brand or another therapeutic area and actually help them their content velocity goals much quickly because we have this enterprise view of that solution as well.
I'll just add a little bit to that. So for us, it's standardization. And a lot of the things that we're talking about require a lot of the organization to understand what that is. And when we talk about the omnichannel strategy that this question was brought up on, it is that we are at Novo Nordisk an Adobe shop. We like the interconnection between the technology. It helps us. But you have to think of standardization as well, and the infancy of where we are as a company with that. So I would say that we're making decisions as they come up in times. And we were trying to author as many things as we can in a single platform, which would be AEM and then get them to downstream systems. But there's an angle of standardization to say, does it make sense sometimes to create a very complex tool that's used for an IVA and build it out in AEM for this one case when we can probably just get it for half the price in traditional models? So I think you have to look at some of these things in that lens to say, "Is it the right time? Does it make sense to do this?" Because we're also looking at banner ads and other things to bring them in. But at what point in time does it make sense? Is the organization ready for that? And are we, as a tech perspective, ready for that and/or operations? So I think all those things together matter as to where we go and at the speed at which we go at. Yeah. I'm getting a lot of change management that's needed across the board here. So I think we've talked about content supply chain at a very high level. Awesome. All right. Well, I'm going to thank this fantastic panel. If you could have a big show of hands here.
[Music]
