Strengthening employee and customer relationships at Polpharma by transforming communications

About Polpharma

Polpharma is one of the largest manufacturers of pharmaceuticals in Poland. Their distribution network covers the markets of Central and Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia. With a long history on the market, they are a trusted partner for patients, healthcare professionals, and business associates.

The Challenge

Understanding the endgame is always a powerful way to start any successful digital transformation project. With Polpharma, we understood from the beginning that their mission was maintaining a commitment to excellence in providing high-quality pharmaceuticals, from the first phases of R&D right up to the product reaching the customer. Key parts of that journey were, therefore, customer focus and responsiveness. We also knew that teamwork was a cornerstone of how they delivered on this mission, ensuring cross-departmental collaboration where positive intent and mutual respect were driving values.

Delivering a fully integrated, end to end, customer engagement and delivery experience was identified as the key intention of this project—our technical solution needed to provide the right environment for it. Building the right culture and capabilities for users meant that technology would free them to deliver on their mission.

The Solution

The Predica Team worked rapidly to bring the new experience to life with a highly customized and extendable intranet that formed the heart of the organization. It became the meeting point for Polpharma employees dispersed around different locations all over the world, both on desktop and mobile, using Yammer as the enterprise social platform. Below you can see Yammer engagement statistics in 2019 compared with 2018.

Driving Customer Engagement

Integrating CRM with an ERP system, SharePoint, Exchange Online and Microsoft Project made it possible to build a user-friendly application for Polpharma salespeople. This is the place where all the information about the customers from multiple sources was gathered, making it more accessible, fostering collaboration and allowing for building strong relationships with clients.

Predictive Analytics for Sales and Marketing

External factors such as weather conditions can have a big impact on sales performance in the pharmaceuticals market. We built a fully extensible platform based on machine learning algorithms that processes relevant data and provides accurate sales and revenue forecasts, visualized for end-users in the form of Power BI reports. The visualizations give Polpharma valuable business insights, allowing them to adapt their marketing and sales activities accordingly, incl. marketing budget allocation, media plan optimization etc.

End-Users are the Key

During the collaboration with Polpharma, we delivered numerous workshops for key stakeholders and end-users, using methods such as design thinking, in order to help them adopt the new solutions, ensuring they become a helping hand, and not a burden.

We created several Power BI dashboards and reports to measure SharePoint and Yammer activity, which help to easily assess if the new services are being used. The Internal Communication Department can review usage and engagement, taking into account metrics such as the most popular content and authors, the most active editors, users’ activity in time, and other useful data. The aim is to gain actionable insights to support the team in evaluating the success of the project and planning new ways to encourage user adoption.

Security Matters

Security is a core expertise of ours. To ensure the highest level of safety measures, we carried out numerous security audits and cloud security assessments to detect any potential threats and recommend adequate solutions. We also conducted workshops to advise Polpharma’s specialists on Azure tools for maintaining platform security. Last but not least, we implemented Multi-Factor Authentication to provide employees with secure access to the company’s resources in the cloud.

The Results

Polpharma’s employees now benefit from a single, unified environment which provides them with all the necessary resources and data in a secure way. They can easily collaborate with each other, sharing knowledge and insights. Communicating with customers is much easier thanks to centralizing client data, giving a rounded view of the client relationship.

This full-stack approach was very effective in helping Polpharma focus on their mission. Employees are now equipped with the right tools to make their work easier and achieve their goals.

Thanks to its comprehensive approach, the app will be very effective in the long term, as it encompasses a broad spectrum of company activities. The technology itself is future-proof, whereas the procedures, due to standardization, are easy to adopt and follow. Polpharma can continue their mission of delivering excellence, without having to worry about technology standing in their way – and instead, using it to their advantage.

Building Culture & Capabilities to Transform

Polpharma’s cloud journey has only just begun, as technology gives many more possibilities. We have laid the foundations by sharing the knowledge and following best practices to simplify the change process within the organization and encourage adoption. The results are already promising, and so our collaboration continues as together we plan new solutions to further aid their sales and marketing efforts. There is much to look forward to, and we are proud to support Polpharma in their continuing success.