Satyam BPO, the business processing arm of Satyam Computer Services, is tapping a new wave of opportunities in the life sciences segment and is now high on long-term contracts.
To facilitate the global pharma industry, which is passing through upswings due to increase in the raw materials, R&D costs and thin drugs pipeline, the company would be offering end-to-end services in pharmacovigilance, litigations, market analytics and e-learning in the pharma segment.
Giving an overview of its future plans, Pradip Advani, business head, Solutions and Relationship Management, said that the company is now eyeing long-term contracts as the business is shifting gears and the focus would be more towards core activities. ?Apart from clinical data management, we have identified certain niche areas having lots of business opportunities such as clinical assessments, market analytics, safety narrative writings including a new service called platform BPO,? he said.
From the industry point of view, these services are unique for the fact that the global pharma companies are still apprehensive about offshoring core services. ?From a mere shared service provider in back office operations, we would be broadbasing the service offerings. The year 2008-09 would be real and active with integrations of end-to end services unlike a mere back office service provider,? he explained.
This would include pharmacovigilance activities, entire breadth of services in litigations, regulatory filings and medical assessments. Interestingly, the company has offered services to over 8,000 litigations filed by a few pharma companies in the last one year. As part of its another initiative, it is also planning to set up customised call centres to provide medical support services for providing informed leads to physicians on their queries. ?Following the wave of maturity, we would soon be tying up with a large platform provider for hosted services as part of remote data capture,? he said.
In the area of analytics, the company would soon be signing up with a client for knowledge transfer. Two more projects are in the pipeline for pilot and proof-of-concept. ?E-learning, a new concept in the pharma services industry, is another untapped area,? he said. This would include animation services to re-engineer their models in many therapeutics areas. The company is currently talking to three companies to initiate pilot projects.
Fuelling its expansion of services is the stringent regulatory norms proposed by the USFDA, which has increased its scrutiny over the pharma majors across the globe. More so, the global pharma industry is on a vendor consolidation activity and hence cost arbitrage of about 25-40% continues to be magic wand for the pharma offshoring services.
