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This article is based on the sharing of Cao Fenze, CIO of China Biopharma Tianqing at the 12th CIAPH Pharmaceutical and Health Industry Digitalization Summit Forum
Some people say that the biggest challenge in digital transformation is not the technology itself, but the efficient collaboration with the business. For digital departments, meeting and empowering the needs of the business is an important value manifestation. However, in the process of implementation, we often find that it is difficult for the business department to be fully satisfied - unrealistic requirements are difficult to meet, and inaccurate requirements make it difficult to implement the project. Overall, the battle between digital and business seems to never stop.
So, for CIOs, how to build a digital system that not only conforms to the essence of business operations but also meets the measurement indicators? Let the digital department better empower the business is an important enlightenment shared by Cao Fenze, CIO of China Biopharma | Here's a rundown of what he said.
Cao Fenze, CIO of China Biopharma|CT Tianqing
Dear colleagues, my name is Cao Fenze, and I am currently the head of digitalization of Sino Biopharma and Chia Tai Tianqing. Today, I will discuss with you the transformation and innovation of the pharmaceutical industry in the new era of science and technology. I hope that through my sharing, I can provide you with new thoughts and insights.
First of all, let's take a look at China Biopharmaceutical Group. As a pioneer in innovation and R&D promotion in China, China's biopharmaceutical business covers the entire industrial chain from drug R&D, intelligent production to sales. The core members of the group include a number of subsidiaries such as Chia Tai Tianqing, Beijing Tide, Nanjing Chia Tai Tianqing, Chia Tai Qingjiang, and Chia Tai Fenghai, focusing on key areas such as oncology, respiratory, liver disease and surgical analgesia, serving more than 20 million patients every year. In terms of strategic direction, Sino Biopharma is committed to four core strategies: organizational integration, comprehensive innovation, internationalization and digitalization. The digital strategy has become a key priority for our Group, and based on this, we have carried out a wide range of practices and experiments.
With the deepening of digital transformation, Sino Biopharma is facing higher requirements to achieve refined business operations and scientific decision-making. Therefore, our goal is to promote business management from refinement to intelligent upgrading through the power of technology. Our digital strategy has encompassed the entire spectrum of the company – from R&D to production, supply chain management, to sales, ensuring efficient and consistent business processes. Through in-depth analysis of individual business units, we rely on advanced digital systems to collect and analyze data, which is translated into key business indicators and builds a comprehensive data network. Not only does this allow us to conduct in-depth data analysis to understand the core of our business operations, but it also helps us identify the key factors that support our decision-making.
In drug development, we have adopted a comprehensive digital management approach covering every stage from early discovery to preclinical studies and clinical trials, enhancing project visibility and process control. In the field of production, comprehensive digital management helps to identify and respond to possible risks in the production process at an early stage, ensuring the efficiency and quality of production. At the sales level, we promote the scientific decision-making and refined management of the sales business through the comprehensive digital management of customer interaction and operation processes.
Throughout the transformation process, we have used new technologies such as AI and large models to continuously innovate the concepts and practices of business management, product development, and customer service. Through this technology-driven strategy, we are committed to improving the quality and efficiency of our business and ensuring that we stay ahead of the competition in the market.
The R&D field is a highly professional scenario, and the key decision we face is whether to choose outsourced technology solutions or independent R&D. This decision depends on an in-depth understanding of business needs and an assessment of our technical capabilities. After in-depth engagement with the business, we prefer to outsource technology solutions that are highly specialized, commercially reasonable, and compliant with industry regulations to quickly obtain digital tools and ensure compliance. For scenarios with high data security requirements, no need for a large number of custom development, and procurement costs are calculated on a project-by-project basis, we choose to develop in-house research to enhance the flexibility and control of enterprises while ensuring data security.
On the production side, our main tasks are how to achieve efficient scheduling, precise execution and maximum quality assurance. Our core focuses on the data connection of the whole production process, such as from material entry to production picking, execution and finished product warehousing, so as to realize the refined management of the production process. By continuously monitoring changes in production business indicators, we can identify potential risks in the production process and thus improve production efficiency and quality.
In the field of marketing, we are committed to providing medical representatives with all kinds of digital equipment to improve their work efficiency and service quality. The challenge we face is the variance of competence of medical representatives. In order to solve this problem, we communicate deeply with the business, extract the behaviors and strategies of excellent medical representatives, and carry them through a digital system. And these behaviors are distributed to all medical representatives through tasks, so that business personnel can intuitively understand the knowledge and to-do items that need to be learned, so as to improve the overall business level.
In the direction of corporate management, we focus on human resources, finance, risk control and corporate operations, aiming to provide all-round support for the group's strategic planning, resource investment, risk management and digital operations.
At the group level, we are committed to building an integrated platform. In the past, the subsidiaries of the group operated independently, and based on the strategic goal of organizational integration, we will improve the underlying SaaS foundation and build a business middle platform, capability middle platform and data middle platform. The upper-level business starts from finance and procurement, and builds a unified digital platform for the group. In the next step, we will deepen our group support for our core business of R&D, production and sales. Overall, through the construction of the Group's integrated platform, we aim to achieve organizational integration and improve overall business efficiency.
With the rapid development of AI and large models, we continue to explore in various fields of biopharmaceuticals, and we will select several scenarios in key areas to share about the implementation of AI within the group.
In drug discovery, we leverage AI to optimize the R&D process. Drug discovery is a complex and costly process that has traditionally relied on the experience of chemists and extensive experimentation. With the help of AI, we can leverage the drug molecule database for efficient design during the molecular design phase, predict the success rate of chemical reactions and biological tests under experimental conditions, and give suggestions for improvement during the molecular optimization phase. The core value of AI lies in the ability to screen candidates with potential for success before experiments, which greatly shortens the R&D cycle.
In clinical trials, we have improved efficiency and accuracy through AI writing technology. Using machine learning and natural language processing, AI can quickly generate structured documents, annotate inconsistencies and potential omissions, and suggest revisions, dramatically improving document quality and processing speed, freeing up researchers' time to focus on research.
In the field of drug production, in the face of complex market demand and production processes, we have achieved efficient production scheduling through AI optimization algorithms and machine learning capabilities. By entering pre-production constraints, the system automatically generates an optimized production plan that can be further adjusted by experts, significantly reducing inventory and increasing productivity.
In the field of pharmaceutical marketing, the challenge is how to effectively manage and utilize the vast amount of medical and academic materials. Through the self-developed large model of the group, accurate medical data is exported to medical personnel to improve the efficiency of their knowledge acquisition. At the same time, based on this large model, we instill knowledge of legal affairs, finance, production GMP, and R&D into the model, continuously train and output, build various digital employees of the enterprise, and provide continuous services for the enterprise.
In the field of academic conferences, we are exploring how to intelligently handle tasks such as invitation letter issuance, conference plan formulation, people counting, sign-in, speech-to-text, conference key points and meeting minutes generation through AI, so as to realize the intelligent generation and personalized push of academic reports. These practical cases demonstrate the strong potential and practical value of AI and large models in the pharmaceutical industry, bringing the dual advantages of efficiency improvement and cost reduction to enterprises.
To sum up, the digital transformation of traditional industries is both a complex challenge and an opportunity. This process is far from easy, mainly because we need to overcome technical challenges, but more importantly, we need to achieve deep integration between technology and business, build a common understanding, and develop digital solutions that are widely recognized by the business community. Despite the bumpy road, as digital transformation continues to deepen, we are able to see more possibilities. Digital transformation will not only help us reduce costs and increase efficiency, but the application of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence will further enhance the efficiency and results of this process. Thank you all for listening, and I hope my sharing will inspire you and give you food for thought.
END
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About the CIO Development Center
The "CIO Development Center" was initiated in 2005 by a group of CIOs who are passionate about the career development of CIOs in China, with the purpose of "aggregating the power of CIOs in China and boosting the business value of CIOs". It aims to promote the promotion of professional norms, the improvement of the growth environment and the improvement of the quality of the team through academic and experience exchanges, knowledge and concept publicity, so as to promote the improvement of the level of information application and the establishment and improvement of the CIO mechanism.
This article is reprinted with permission from the CIO Development Center