Global pharmaceutical company: Time to market, halved

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Decision Effectiveness

A global pharmaceutical company’s slow, step-by-step approval process left it well outside the top five in the world for development speed. By redesigning decision rights and running work in parallel rather than in sequence, we helped it halve its average time to market and reach world-leading benchmarks for the first time.

Outcome 1: Average time to market cut by 50%
Outcome 2: Two critical stages of development completed at a pace matching the world’s top five companies for the first time (35 days and 12 days)
Outcome 3: The faster way of working became part of the culture, adopted even by external research partners

The challenge

A global pharmaceutical company’s approval process was strictly step by step, with sequential sign-offs and multiple gatekeeping stages. That put it well outside the top five in the world for development speed. Leaders could see the gap but had no way to close it without risking quality.

Left unchanged, the company would keep losing months, and sometimes years, to a slow structure, ceding ground to competitors and delaying the point at which patients could access new treatments.

The approach

Working with the clinical development leaders, we launched a programme that redesigned the structure and decision rights and shifted the work from sequential sign-offs to parallel streams running at the same time. We built a leadership coalition with the team, completed five breakthrough projects and redesigned five key processes, with leaders themselves bringing the wider organization on board.

The impact

Average time to market was cut by 50%. Two critical stages of development were completed at a pace matching the world’s top five companies for the first time. The new, faster way of working became part of the culture, and was even taken up by the external research partners the company worked with.