Oracle Enhances Siebel CRM for Life Sciences Industry

New Features in Siebel 8 Help Pharmaceutical Companies Improve Effectiveness of Sales and Marketing Initiatives and Better Manage Clinical Trials

Oracle today announced specific enhancements to Siebel CRM 8 for the life sciences industry. New features in Siebel CRM 8 enable pharmaceutical companies to manage, synchronize and coordinate all customer interactions across multiple channels.
Siebel Life Sciences, part of Siebel CRM 8, introduces new capabilities designed to help support institutional sales forces more effectively. The release also offers significant enhancements designed to optimize territory realignments and clinical trial activities. In addition, this release, which was delivered as part of Oracle's "Applications Unlimited" program, offers users a superior ownership experience with a choice of multiple deployment options, ease of manageability and low-cost integration.

"With Siebel 8, Oracle has made significant advances in usability and functionality including specific capabilities such as institutional customer management, sales planning and execution all targeted at improving business process efficiency and end-user productivity," said Tomomi Shozen, head of Bayer Healthcare O&I Japan. "We're pleased with their continued commitment to and support for the Japanese pharmaceutical industry."

Expanded Contact Management
In some regions, particularly in Japan, sales representatives do not target physicians individually, but rather based on their institution affiliations. Drivers behind this approach include the need to recognize the influence of a physician within an institution while accounting for the importance of the institution itself. A lack of physician-level prescribing data, which forces companies to rely on sales revenues by hospital, is also a factor in this approach. Siebel Pharma, a module within Siebel Life Sciences, addresses these challenges with new account contact targeting capabilities that allow users to treat the association between an account and a contact as a single entity. Enhancements also allow users to create departments within a hospital and affiliate physicians to them.

Simplified Territory Alignment
Enhancements to Siebel Life Science's Territory Management module enable broader and more sophisticated territory definitions, which drive improved sales force productivity. The module also includes a feature that incorporates sales representatives' local knowledge into the territory alignment process prior to activation, minimizing rework and reducing the number of alignments executed for a sales force. Territory Management also includes new functionality aimed at simplifying administrative tasks and reducing the amount of data entry required from territory administrators, allowing management to focus on organizational priorities.

Expanded Ability to Design and Monitor Clinical Trial Studies
Siebel CRM 8 provides a configurable platform to manage, design and monitor complex clinical trials, and has additional task and rules-based capabilities and superior account origination. For example, users can easily track all forms of communication exchanged within a site or across clinical research organizations, central laboratories and other business partners.

Enhancements to case report tracking capabilities of Siebel Clinical, a component of Siebel Life Sciences, enable users to manage complex case report forms from a single site. Another new feature within Siebel Life Sciences tracks the assignment of researchers and other key personnel by date to a clinical trial and grants proper rights based on these effective dates.

Expanded Sample Management Capabilities
During the course of a physician call, a sales representative may have a product discussion with one physician, but leave samples with and capture signatures from a different one. A new feature in Siebel Life Sciences allows representatives to quickly select a different physician and either create a new sample drop or modify the original call before it is completed. This feature helps to improve sales force productivity and streamline compliance.

"Oracle enhanced features in Siebel 8 specifically to meet the unique needs of life sciences companies," said Oracle Vice President of Product Strategy for Life Sciences Rajan Krishnan. "The latest release provides life sciences organizations with enhanced call planning and execution capabilities, helps them realign their territories more effectively and allows them to achieve new efficiencies-and facilitate compliance during clinical trials. Siebel 8 also serves as another proof point to Oracle's commitment to its customers under the "Applications Unlimited" program."