While Pharma companies have long invested in CRMs to help sales reps manage the relationships with their health care practitioners (HCPs), DTR solutions often take a backseat. It is not uncommon for a Pharma home office team to email spreadsheets to fulfillment vendors, indicating what items to ship to which reps that the reps can then share with their customers. OrderPoint brings the kind of sophisticated automation to the home office-sales rep relationship that modern CRMs provide for rep-to-HCP relationships.
OrderPoint was designed as an advanced DTR solution from its first release in 2016. It allowed sales reps to request samples and promotional materials for shipment to themselves. They could also download digital assets (e.g., educational materials and brochures). Multi-language capabilities were also included. Advanced features allowed reps to submit convention orders and request drop shipments.
OrderPoint has gone through several incremental improvements over time. One major enhancement was Rep Mimic View™, which gave home office users the ability to mimic the view that sales reps see in OrderPoint for training and diagnostic purposes. The latest release is a leap forward in several ways.
“Our number one objective for OrderPoint 2 was to provide sales reps a sublime user experience,” said Suhail Mughal, Chief Technology Officer at QPharma. “Our customers told us that reps need something intuitive—otherwise training will be a challenge and the adoption will be low.”
Gone are the workmanlike grids and drop-downs, replaced by a lively and elegant design that bespeaks the modern e-commerce shopping cart experience. Samples and promotional materials are now displayed in a gallery view interspersed with visual cues—a sea-change from the strict tabular design of the original OrderPoint. The new user interface design also has expanded support for different screen sizes, taking OrderPoint’s responsive capabilities to the next level.
While the compliance rules are different for DTP and DTR systems—e.g., there is no signature requirement at the time of request for sales reps—compliance is at the heart of OrderPoint from its inception. Since its first release, OrderPoint supported integrations with the client’s learning management systems to limit rep access only to products for which they have received training. Building on QPharma’s mission of solving client compliance challenges, OrderPoint 2 includes an expansion of the audit trail to cover downloadable digital assets; this feature now makes it possible for home office teams to reach out to sales reps who may have downloaded materials that are no longer approved for sharing.
As part of QPharma’s Titanium suite of applications, OrderPoint inherited the Titanium platform’s customer master records, sales rep rosters, business rules engine, and reporting and dashboarding capabilities. Any integrations that the client had with Titanium could also be leveraged by OrderPoint. However, what makes OrderPoint powerful is its ability to enforce allocation limits for samples and promotional materials.
“Imagine hundreds of reps, thousands of items, different allocations for each—some fixed, some derived, some overridden by managers—and then enforcing these limits real-time,” said Anne Rose Galang, Vice President of Innovation at QPharma. “And you begin to see the sophistication of the technology.”
OrderPoint not only needs to enforce allocation limits but also help the rep understand why they do not have access to an item. The reasons could be anything from the warehouse inventory being low to an item not being aligned to a sales rep’s selling team.
Other improvements include new features to manage vacant territories and districts; a workflow for home office teams to submit, review, and approve proposed sales team allocations; and enhanced and new dashboards that provide greater insight to home office teams regarding allocation usage, product utilization, and trends.
