Boehringer Ingelheim uses allianceboard to support its alliance management function
Key outcomes
- Access to reliable alliance information and insights in a centralized platform available to key stakeholders increases transparency.
- Improved team efficiency by automating routine alliance management tasks such as reporting and dashboarding.
- Greater quality data available for engagement with stakeholders and enhanced ability to make strategic decisions based on robust data.
allianceboard has transformed our approach to alliance management, providing us with the tools to maintain consistency, enhance efficiency, and achieve our strategic goals. With real-time access to a single version of the truth, we can focus on high-value activities that drive partnership success.
- Dr. Stefan Walke, Head of Alliance Management
Challenge: Managing a diverse and growing portfolio efficiently
The emphasis on alliance management and supportive tools within Boehringer Ingelheim is matched with the support of a growing, diversified alliance portfolio while fostering the company’s reputation as a partner of choice.
Over time the Human Pharma alliance management teams working across two business units identified areas that needed attention to ensure they could deliver on their mandate efficiently:
- Ensuring consistency in terminology, concepts and general information collected across alliances by different alliance managers to support knowledge sharing, learning and data aggregation for better insights across the portfolio.
- Reducing manual efforts for routine activities including the extraction of financial data for budget consolidation and creating portfolio view reports.
- Ensuring smooth transitions and handovers between alliance managers and business units as part of the alliance life cycle and shifts in alliance manager responsibility.
To this extent the alliance management team aimed for a more standardized data-driven approach in a single software tool to enhance consistency, comparability and efficiency while offering deeper insights and improved individual alliance and portfolio steering.
Solution: Enabling alliance management with allianceboard
After evaluating and piloting potential solutions, the Boehringer Ingelheim team decided to implement allianceboard.
At the outset, key stakeholders were involved in the initial design phase to provide their requirements ensuring that allianceboard could serve as a single version of the truth across the organization.
Based on their findings the team captured core alliance information, contract information, financials, key events, risks and risk management plans as well as other important alliance data and related documents in a standard format across the alliance portfolio.
Today allianceboard is used by the alliance management teams and their stakeholders who can easily maintain and self-serve their alliance information needs.
We collaborated with our key stakeholders to define which data to capture, the right terminology and reporting requirements. The allianceboard software is very flexible so it was easy to customize, and we can adapt it quickly as our needs evolve.
– Dr. Stephanie Glaser, Alliance Management, Innovation Unit
Clarity and consistency through common language and process
The alliance management team refined their alliance management process and terminology and standardized these across their alliance portfolio within allianceboard. This systematic approach makes it possible to quickly understand individual alliances, aggregate information across different segments of the portfolio and develop rich insights.
It simplifies the transfer of ownership for a partner or project, ensuring a seamless transition without losing critical insights or momentum within the alliance management team in cases such as departures or leaves of absence, as well as supporting internal communication across business units when an alliance moves through the stages of its lifecycle from early to late R&D.
With allianceboard, Boehringer Ingelheim has an up-to-date record of each alliance in its portfolio and the ability to quickly understand the goals and history of collaborations, past decisions as well as status and important upcoming milestones, events, risks and decisions to be made.
A platform tailored to drive alliance results
Having a state-of-the-art alliance management platform brings value to Boehringer Ingelheim at several levels.
With allianceboard, individual alliance managers now have a specialized system and approach to consistently track specific aspects of their assigned alliances including:
- contractual information
- payments
- governance committee members and meetings
- risks, issues and decisions
- deliverables, action items and important deadlines
- partnership health and status
This enables them to engage effectively with partners and stakeholders and to adopt and share practices and learnings across alliances. This approach also helps to gain clarity and focus through the complexity of the daily routine of alliance managers.
Besides ensuring smooth transitions or bridging in case of absences and re-assignment of alliances, one-on-one discussions on key topics are much easier with consistent, easily accessible information.
The Head of Alliance Management can keep a portfolio perspective on the status, achievements and challenges across alliances as basis for conversations with each individual alliance manager. At any given time, reliable information about key items such as past or upcoming governance activities or key milestones is readily available.
Regular requests for specific portfolio analyses based on internal stakeholder queries – for instance “how many active partnerships do we have in a given country of interest” or “which partnerships were initiated within a given period of time”, are now easily addressed.
allianceboard gives me real-time insight into the overall health of all our alliances, helping me identify trends, challenges, and track progress across the portfolio, without having to speak to each individual alliance manager. Furthermore, allianceboard helps me to streamline where my focus needs to be in individual 1:1 conversations with my AM team members.
-Dr. Stefan Walke, Head of Alliance Management
At an organization level, allianceboard enables Boehringer Ingelheim to track and plan financial implications of their broad alliance portfolio, based on alliance manager inputs and judgements. It also enables smooth hand-over and collaboration across organizational units as alliances progress through their lifecycle.
Relieving admin burden to invest time where it matters most
Before implementing allianceboard, the alliance management team had to spend time searching for, reconciling and formatting data to prepare for meetings and to generate reports.
Collaborating with multiple internal stakeholders across departments to align this data consumed valuable time from the alliance management team. With allianceboard, a single version of the truth is available in real-time. When allianceboard is deployed within an organization, it is possible for stakeholders to access live, actionable dashboards and reports – bringing a significant reduction in admin burden and enabling a stronger focus on high-value generation activities such as anticipating issues, managing risks, and fostering open communication and trust, to achieve the intended value of alliances.
Having all our alliance data in allianceboard enables us to be more agile and efficient- it removes the need to search for, compare, reconcile and format alliance data, so we can focus on driving the interests of all participating parties forward.
– Dr. Nicole Mohren, Alliance Manager
Stronger focus in key discussions
Having rich insights at their fingertips, the Boehringer Ingelheim alliance management team and their stakeholders can engage more productively in discussions focused on business issues and outcomes in its alliances and drive alliance success at scale.
As our team and portfolio expand and evolve, our interactions remain consistent, proactive and agile, fostering more productive collaborations. With the easy access to data through allianceboard, the organization can more easily recognize the strategic value that alliance management contributes to driving partnership success and innovation.
-Dr. Stefan Walke, Head of Alliance Management
About Boehringer Ingelheim
Boehringer Ingelheim is a biopharmaceutical company active in both human and animal health. As one of the industry’s top investors in research and development, the company focuses on developing innovative therapies that can improve and extend lives in areas of high unmet medical need. Independent since its foundation in 1885, Boehringer takes a long- term perspective, embedding sustainability along the entire value chain. More than 53,500 employees serve over 130 markets to build a healthier, more sustainable, and equitable tomorrow. Learn more at www.boehringeringelheim.com.
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