DOXA SAS uses C&D to create a balanced districting which takes into account the specificities of the pharmaceutical industry

Create a balanced and fair districting for your sales team

Take into account the constraints related to the pharmaceutical industry

Target the places where it is necessary to hire sales representatives.

Serge Andrieu, CEO of DOXA SAS and sociologist and statistician by training, specialized in BtoB and BtoC market studies. Nowadays, he works exlusively for the pharmaceutical industry. In 2011, he created DOXA SAS to support pharmaceutical companies and help them adapt to market changes by making the right arbitrations. The purpose was to create tools to help those companies monitor the market and its evolutions.

Serge Andrieu explains the specific needs that caused him to turn to location intelligence : managing the redefinition of the districts of sales representatives of a pharmaceutical company after a new product arrived on the market.

Serge Andrieu (DOXA SAS) : « With Articque, I realized that you don’t have to be a geographer to guarantee the efficiency of an organization, and I am grateful for it. »

« With Articque, I realized that you don’t have to be a geographer to guarantee the efficiency of an organization, and I am grateful for it. »

The emergence of a new need : a tool to redraw the districts of pharmaceutical sales representatives.

In 2013, a pharmaceutical company specialized in cardiology introduced a new product on the market, which brought a new need to light : the need to segment the prescribing population while taking numerous criteria into account, such as :

the ability of doctors to prescribe the product,
their medical specialty (general practitioner, cardiologist…),
their sensitivity to the therapeutic class in question,
the healthcare services available close to them…

The purpose was to create a segmented and exhaustive database of all considered targets in order to know prescribers better.

Once this segmentation was done, it became clear the districts of pharmaceutical sales representatives had to be redrawn in order to best address the targets : was it necessary to hire new sales representatives? To redefine the districts?

A new product on the market requires a new districting

Serge Andrieu : « Integrating location analytics to a consulting company like mine was a formidable growth factor. »

« Integrating location analytics to a consulting company like mine was a formidable growth factor. »

Taking into account the numerous constraints related to the parmaceutical industry in the definition of sales districts.

balanced sales districts for the pharmaceutical industry

The software C&D had to make it possible to take into account specific constraints :

Constraints related to the environment : location of potential customer base, territorial organization of health services, reception habits of health professionals…
Constraints related to corporate culture : number of visits per sales representative…
Constraints related to Human Resources : fair repartition of workload between sales representatives, distance covered, skills management, necessity of retaining more than 2/3 of the activity rate of the former organization for the new one…

« When I started, at the end of 2013, it was my first districting. I only did one that year. Then I made 5 in 2015, 7 in 2016, 11 in 2017, 28 in 2018. It was ex extremely solid economic revolution for me, since I found a natural extension to statistic analysis, which remains at the core of my business. [Location intelligence] enhances this analysis in a remarkable way. »

« Location intelligence facilitated the management of resources and was an internal growth driver. »

« Location intelligence facilitated the management of resources and was an internal growth driver. »

Articque’s solution made it possible to easily create a districting while taking into account numerous constraints.

When Serge Andrieu started looking for a tool to carry out a districting which satisfied those constraints, several questions arose

Which software could be flexible and powerful enough to deal with databases containing between 80,000 and 200,000 doctors ?
Would it be possible to work on the specific geographic breakdowns of the pharmaceutical industry (UGA) ?
What workload would it represent ?
How much training would it take to be able to use the software independently ?
…

After a first, successful trial, Serge Andrieu settled on C&D, which allows him to provide his clients a fair districting, with sales representatives living whenever possible at the heart of their district and reasonable distances to cover (for the sake of personnel safety). It is possible to provide every sales representative with a booklet containing a map comparing their former and their new district and displaying the density of contacts per area, as well as the road network.

Creating new districts highlights where it is necessary to hire new sales representatives ; the software then places the centroid of the district, which allows the company to target the ideal hiring area of the new sales rep so that they are located at the heart of their district.

« Location analytics allowed a spatial optimization through applied statistics. It let us bring numerous pharmaceutical companies back from significant social and economic deficits, and create sociological equity within companies. »

« Location analytics allowed a spatial optimization through applied statistics. It let us bring numerous pharmaceutical companies back from significant social and economic deficits, and create sociological equity within companies. »

The advantages of C&D and Articque in Serge Andrieu’s words

The advantages of C&D and Articque

The software is “extremely intuitive”
The training course was “very well led and very interesting, it went far beyond basic necessities”
“Regular updates, which make DOXA’s offer more and more valuable for our clients”
The Assistance team is “extremely professional and receptive, and always has an answer for everything.”
A “very short implementation period: one week and a half in my case. Everything went very fast; I have nothing negative to say: it’s a remarkable software.”

Like DOXA SAS, optimize your districting now with location intelligence!