Revolutionising Business Strategy and Forecasting: How a Women Leader Leveraged The Right Tools To Overcome Pharmaceutical Challenges
Sanobar Syed, a seasoned expert with over 14 years of experience, is revolutionizing the forecasting, insights, and strategy in the pharmaceutical industry with her global data-driven approach.
Pharmaceutical forecasting is a lot more complex than most other sectors because it involves modeling a disease, complex healthcare system, market access all of which vary widely by country and geography. No two diseases or countries behave the same, and often treatments within the same disease will need to be modeled differently. The process of forecasting is often made difficult when a new medicine has just been brought to market or rapid deployment of a drug needs to happen in response to say example a pandemic due to a lack of concrete evidence to base estimations on.
Forecasts by their very definition involve a degree of uncertainty. When a company fails to meet demand, it can have major implications on the drug and the pharmaceutical company. The company may experience loss in sales, a bad reputation for unreliability with customers and overworked employees. Hence it is extremely important for the company to be as closely accurate as possible in developing the business strategies and forecasts.
However, when you look at this critical field there is not a lot of representation available in the industry. There is one such expert who is changing the norm and how. Ms. Sanobar Syed has been instrumental in driving change and rapidly becoming North America’s favorite forecaster and how. An MBA coupled with Masters in Organic Chemistry equip her speak business and science in the same language- A formidable & unique talent. Leading, advising and driving multimillion dollar brands in her career role for big pharma giants like Beigene, AbbVie, Novartis she has bought in a revolution. She has developed curriculum for the Life science Accelerator project in collaboration with Toronto metropolitan university, Canada and become a beacon for many young aspiring science professionals to take up this field as a preferred career choice.
During a conversation with Ms. Sanobar Syed, she informed how she is developing forecasts and business strategies by leveraging her expertise in market research, data, and analytics. According to Ms. Syed, models are critical components for developing scalable and highly accurate forecasts that assist senior management, cross functional leadership, and business partners in making critical day-to-day and long-term decisions. She explained how combining data from various sources about businesses can help to assess their overall risk. To improve the accuracy of her model, she used state of the art techniques and developed intuitive dashboards models to generate accurate market assessments- a key information to drive any organization strategy in real-time.
Market research and Strategic forecasting is how companies make informed predictions about their future performance within their specific target markets. By using market research and historical data, marketers can make forecasts about demands and trends that will help them better predict future revenues. However easier said than done.
Sanobar adds, “It’s a mammoth task to convert the insights to foresights. Especially if the firm is undergoing M&A or restructuring of the business/brands, it becomes critical to continue generate insights and be an enabler in decision making. Resource allocation, budgeting, inventory & supply management, P&L and finance are some of the functions impacted by the presence of sharp insights. One of the human level challenges can be shifting priorities, attrition or layoffs, data quality issues etc. Both the organization and human level challenges persists but the show must always go on”
Sanobar has successfully helped not only her professional organizations but also nonprofit organizations like Women Leaders in Pharma (WLP), Canada to start their own strategic dashboards and analytics to drive accountability, impact and decision making. WLP has growing followership base of 13K + pharmaceutical women from all parts of North America, she has built models from scratch and helped to go from “reactive” to “proactive” in strategy. Her community as well as global impact has been lauded by many awards. The recent being the “Achievement of the Year at Titan Women in Business Award 2023” and “Modern leader at Medtop Award in May 2023”. These awards also show that how she is seen as an expert in this field while building an entire business continuity and turnaround solutions to the today’s challenges. The success of her tried and tested tools and relevance has given her an edge to be invited in various reputed conferences around the globe.
Business strategy and forecasting leaders in the pharmaceutical industry can improve patient lives by using the tools and best practices developed by Sanobar Syed. These models benefit companies (profit and non-profit) and can benefit ultimately the patients by reducing costs, errors, and time as well as improving risk insights and compliance. By leveraging forecasting, data, and analytics to develop scalable and accurate solutions, expert leaders like Sanobar Syed have the power to make a positive impact on the pharmaceutical industry.
Author
Arjun Singh
