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Blog
Why Aren’t Executives Getting the Forecasts They Need?
Rick Johnston, Ph.D., Senior Principal, Software Solutions Lead
Abigail McGarey, Manager
Apr 23, 2021
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  • Why Aren't Executives Getting the Forecasts They Need?

Forecasters love data. They love to bring together disparate sets of information, synthesize them, and run complex analytics to accurately forecast commercial success of their company’s product. But when it comes to communicating critical information to executive teams, forecast teams sometimes fall short.

We’ve interviewed dozens of pharmaceutical leaders about their commercial forecasting experiences and resounding message is clear: there are ways to improve the ways forecasting contributes to leadership decisions.

Executives are often presented with PowerPoint decks showcasing numbers they can’t explore, and when they questions that seem simple to them require long lead-times from forecasting teams to generate new scenarios. They know forecasts can be wildly inaccurate, but they feel they have little information about where the numbers came from and what they really mean.

And that’s frustrating for today’s analytics-savvy executives. Executives educated in decision-analysis want to know what the forecast means for the business, and how it might change due to market shifts, new competitors, or emerging geopolitical events that transform the commercial landscape. They may even want the ability to dig into the numbers, not just see high-level dashboards with attractive visuals but limited strategic value.

Throw away the old-fashioned dashboard

Today’s innovative management teams are increasingly moving away from the old ‘display-only’ dashboards and replacing them with analytics and machine-learning tools that bring insights and agility to the forecasting process. This new generation of forecast engines update in real-time and integrate uncertainty analysis, real-world data, estimations of bias, and transparency of estimation. They don’t just give executives accurate projections based on the latest data, but also the freedom to dig deeper into numbers of interest so they can strategize through different outcomes.

At IQVIA, we are at the leading edge of this forecasting transformation, providing evidence-based data and insights to help executives make better decisions. We believe providing senior leaders access to the actual forecast platform used by forecasters – along with rich high-level visualizations – is a powerful approach that will driver deeper insights from senior leadership.

IQVIA’s Forecast Horizon combines an easy-to-use interface with the depth of healthcare data feeds and machine learning automation, meaning forecasters can update forecasts in real time and perform scenario and uncertainty analysis with the most up-to-date data quickly. We’ve included sophisticated visualization tools that support both the power user – who is building and analyzing forecasts – and the management team who need to quickly understand forecast outputs.

By having a single integrated platform, teams eliminate the need for a separate reporting engine and reduce the time forecasters spend manually compiling PowerPoint presentations. The decks are still available, but this platform supports those executives who prefer a ‘choose your own path’ style of navigation over sequential and linear slide presentations.

The Move to Data-driven Decision Making

From the side of the forecasters, we also see these types of tools enabling forecasters to become more involved in informing company strategy. Management teams today possess the lexicon to have meaningful conversations about data, analytics, and forecasting trends. They are also increasingly focused on building teams and capabilities to support data-driven decision making (DDDM). Forecasting teams are ideally suited to take advantage of DDDM philosophies and help management teams in making the pivot towards this way of decision making. And with leading organizations rapidly adopting DDDM, forecasters can have a seat at the table where critical decisions are being made.

DDDM-enabled forecasting is already here. We’ve seen forecast teams running scenarios ‘on the fly’ in board meetings, using real-world data and the experience of the leadership team to respond quickly to changing market conditions. We’ve seen executives accessing forecasts themselves much more regularly - and using the insights they gain to inform sales force sizing, marketing and other key decisions. This focus on forecasts as the data to enable DDDM can make the forecaster a strategic expert, whose guidance can help make products more likely to succeed in an increasingly crowded and competitive market.

This powerful new forecast methodology doesn’t just change the way decisions are made in pharma. As timely decision making becomes more important, forecast analytics is improving—and changing—the way those decisions get made. Data-rich forecasting tools in pharma are becoming a critical driver of change, and that’s a great thing for forecasters and pharma companies alike.

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