Some of our success stories

Managed Services and Data Quality in Pharmaceuticals

Leadership within Sales and Operations was struggling to provide timely responses to inquiries from the 5000+ field sales reps in the U.S. As a result, the company was incurring delays in responding to customer requests. Response on average was 90-120 days, presenting loss of potential sales and risk of regulatory compliance violations. Unable to mobilize the requisite skills internally, and unable to find an outside partner with the requisite industry knowledge and service experience, the company engaged Keen360.

Solution

Leadership within Sales and Operations was struggling to provide timely responses to inquiries from the 5000+ field sales reps in the U.S. As a result, the company was incurring delays in responding to customer requests. Response on average was 90-120 days, presenting loss of potential sales and risk of regulatory compliance violations. Unable to mobilize the requisite skills internally, and unable to find an outside partner with the requisite industry knowledge and service experience, the company engaged Keen360.

Value

The outcome for the client has been a 94 percent reduction in response time to inquiries (to a cycle time of 3-7 days); a single capable point of contact for field sales teams to get answers and resolve issues. Under this model, the Keen360 team handles 80 percent of the inquiries and issues from the field, enabling higher-cost internal knowledge workers to focus on more higher-value responsibilities.

Data Quality in Pharmaceuticals

Leadership in commercial operations and sales in a major global biopharmaceutical corporation specializing in hematology and oncology, were struggling to fully comprehend emerging datasets from internal and syndicated sources; to create the proper linkages across datasets; to deliver actionable insight to the brand franchises. As a result, the business was incurring gaps in sales calculations; undervaluing important customers; excluding relevant accounts as from sales targets. Unable to mobilize the requisite skills internally, and also unable to find an outside partner with the requisite industry knowledge and service experience, the company engaged Keen360.

Solution

To cleanse data on providers and accounts, establish affiliations, and provide a reliably actionable view of the marketplace for upcoming product launches, Keen360 deployed a team of data professionals and technical specialists to analyze, standardize, augment, and affiliate data from the transactional Veeva platform and syndicated data providers. Keen360 collaborated closely and productively with the tier-one vendors responsible for maintaining the Veeva system and a cloud-based reporting platform.

Value

The outcome for the client has been a complete and current view of the affiliated healthcare networks; identification of over 100 new accounts for the field sales organization to target; and a customer master with 97 percent of the records mapped to a syndicated data source. In other words, data is now robust and reliable for making decisions and taking actions.

CRM-Enabled Customer Service for Tech Venture

A well-funded tech venture, HUGHES Telematics Inc. (HTI), bringing first-of-a-kind connected-car technologies and services to global automotive OEMs and enterprise fleet managers.

Having secured its funding, and possessing strong electrical-engineering and network-management capabilities, the ambitious venture needed to design, build, and deploy its services for enabling connected vehicles and providing customer care. And it needed to do so within 18 months, literally starting from scratch, in order to hit the immutable schedules and milestones of its debut OEM customer, a European luxury and performance brand.

Solution

To bring about a high-quality, high-reliability platform within strict timelines and budgets, the client retained an IBM consulting team led by the Keen360 principals, David Lashar and Zahid Khan. David served as the accountable delivery executive, while Zahid served as solution architect for design and realization of workflow and services for both the connected vehicles and the OEM’s customers and partners, as enabled by an enterprise-class IT platform with a service-oriented architecture.

Value

Under leadership from David and Zahid, the client delivered a robust first-generation connected-vehicle solution (people, process, and technology) without either missing a single OEM milestone or exceeding any established budgets. The service went into production operation in the requisite 18 months. After enlisting additional OEMs and other customers, the venture was bought within a few years by a leading telecommunications company for roughly 7X the capital investment.

IT Blueprint and Roadmap for Medical Cannabis

Having raised its capital and been awarded its licenses, a well-funded, professionally-managed startup for growing, processing, and dispensing medical cannabis needed to identify, select, and implement the full range of IT software and services for rapidly establishing, then running and expanding, its operations. The client had established operational excellence and regulatory compliance as foremost priorities. And it had committed to a constrained budget for IT payroll and expenses.

Solution

The client enlisted Keen360’s leader for Commercial360 and Compliance360, David Lashar, to create the blueprint and roadmap for end-to-end IT enablement of the business launch and expansion. The approach was to start with the client’s strategy for differentiation and growth in order to establish priorities, then define the full range of executive, managerial, and operational services (i.e., functions) that would compose the business and be enabled by IT. The subsequent blueprint mapped each business component (i.e., function) to best-in-class IT products and services. A key recommendation, given the imperative for operational excellence and policy compliance, was adoption of the Acadia performance platform.

Value

Using the blueprint and roadmap, the CEO, CFO, COO, and CMO rapidly made its decisions and procurements, retaining IT partners and implementing IT platforms in parallel with building its capital-intensive, state-of-the-art facilities. The IT function caused no disruptions to launch; incurred no budget overruns; proved in the subsequent 2-3 years to be a scalable enabler of growth. The Acadia performance platform has become a source of workforce excellence, operational efficiency, and regulatory compliance, with the CEO characterizing it as a strategic differentiator.

IT Strategy and transformation for a $14B Health-care Agency

The Maryland Department of Health (MDH), is a $14B agency composed of four administrations responsible for health care financing (Medicaid), behavioral health, developmental disabilities, and public health.

Due to decades of underinvestment and weak leadership for IT, MDH was severely compromised in its mission to improve the health and safety of all Marylanders. Vendors were both suing and failing, both on modest-scale projects and enterprise-scale initiatives. Standard IT methods were absent. Major systems were obsolescent. And statutes relating to the intersection of criminal justice and mental health (“justice reinvestment”) were in jeopardy of being violated.

Solution

The governor’s team along with the MDH Secretary brought aboard the Keen360 leader for IT strategy and delivery, David Lashar. In this MDH role (CIO, then COO and Chief of Staff) just prior to joining Keen360, David rapidly fixed the acute problems with vendor performance and internal methods, then shifted to drafting a blueprint, still gradually but steadily being realized, for proper Enterprise IT for MDH and the broader State IT function. To address the challenges with meeting justice-reinvestment statutes, David orchestrated implementation of the State’s first cloud-based CRM platform for case management, Salesforce.com. David also introduced the Acadia performance platform for workforce learning and process consistency to MDH.

Value

The Enterprise IT model produced and promoted by Keen360’s leader, David Lashar, continues to drive overhaul and improvement of IT within MDH and even the broader State enterprise, with a governance model for major IT initiatives (as large as ~$300M in size) being a particularly valuable innovation. With Salesforce.com for case management, MDH met its statutory requirements, with David and his team reducing the cycle times for admissions for court-ordered placements for health services by orders of magnitudes, for example from ~100 days to <21 days for justice-involved individuals needing treatment for substance use disorders (i.e., addictions). With the Acadia performance platform, the Office for Health Care Quality (OHCQ) earned (rare) public praise from Maryland’s General Assembly for raising productivity, improving the quality of health care delivered in private facilities throughout Maryland, while simultaneously adhering to established budgets and headcount.