I got my first look at Verix recently. Verix targets the commercial side of Pharmaceutical companies – sales first, then managed care and then marketing. They are trying to shift the burden of analysis work from sales managers, sales consultants to automated systems. They started with a core analytic competency and it evolved over time into a complete performance management and domain knowledge to target sales management. While they are currently focused on Pharma they are also exploring other verticals such as CPG and financial services.
Sales managers, like most managers, have too much data, too many reports. They ask specific questions to understand performance but they do not have time or bandwidth to ask every possible question about what they should worry about. Verix is designed to offer automated exploration of the data to find what should be done and help companies make sure this is actually what happens.
Pharma companies buy syndicated data about prescriptions and have sales force automation data in their own systems. Supporting managed care companies, general field execution and the activities of competition all play a part in the market. The sales teams may have problems and opportunities in changing co-pay or other pricing, changing messaging, helping improve compliance (so people take all the doses they are supposed to take), target physicians etc.
Verix provides a managed service for performance management in this environment. The solution is delivered using a SaaS architecture. Clients provide data, which Verix aggregates and integrates with external data. Analytics find trends, identify emerging opportunities and threats, and do root cause analysis. Finally the software has reports and dashboards for sales, marketing etc.
- Dashboards
These provide a summary level perspective – by main KPIs or by business area (Managed care volume, segment performance, product performance v competition etc). Verix has a nice dashboard environment, very interactive with drill down, filters etc. - Reports
These offer further detail behind the dashboard. Some people might only get a subset of the reports for their areas, their products etc. Just like in the dashboard the reports and graphs update as you select geographies or segments in one part of the report. - Hotspots
The most interesting piece for me is their identification of hotspots. Verix have identified a series of hotspots such as markets that are growing even though they are not being targeted or products that are losing market share. The hotspot reports show those physicians, market segments, products etc that are in one of these categories. These hotspots are found using analytics not just thresholds and drill into the reasons for each identified hotspot. These hotspots are more than just a graph, less than high-end data mining. Managers can mark these hotspot events for tracking and see what happened later (did the actions they took have an impact) too as well as sending alerts to those who should act. - Analyzer
Verix offer and hoc and some what if capability for completeness
Verix is an interesting example of a product on the cusp between performance management/dashboards and data mining/predictive analytics. The focus on a specific set of business decisions, the automated identification of hotspots and the ability to be very active from within the dashboard are all nice features.
