Is it time to implement material review capabilities within your life sciences organization? Whether it’s to support a commercial launch or pre-launch disease awareness campaigns, the implementation of a marketing material review platform, like Veeva PromoMats, is crucial to enabling a compliant review process for promotional and non-promotional materials. When embarking on the journey, Marketing Operations leaders should keep in mind these four considerations for implementing Veeva PromoMats.

4 Considerations for Implementing Veeva PromoMats 

1. Roles & Responsibility:

The key to a successful Veeva PromoMats implementation is the availability of process subject matter experts (SMEs)and the alignment on their roles and responsibilities. While certain decisions, such as the role of a legal reviewer to ensure claims follow legal guidelines and limit liability, may be obvious, other more nuanced considerations are required to set up the system for success.

Questions like, “How will medical, legal, and regulatory reviewers be designated to support marketing material review?” or “What roles and responsibilities will these individuals have in medical materials review?” become crucial for not only shaping system requirements but also in making organizational decisions around who will be operating in which systems. You may also need to consider the roles that exist that supplement the process but aren’t directly involved in the reviewing of materials, such as a material review coordinator. This role oversees the process, ensuring that the material moves from stage to stage, and that comments and action items are resolved. They will need to understand the Vault Platform more than the average users, as well as the end-to-end MLR and business processes, rather than a silo. Some companies choose to train someone in-house to take this role, or use external resources to augment the position indefinitely – or until they have the means to take it on themselves. The degree of rigor needed for review coordination can vary depending on how much content there will be up for review, so it’s important to have a strong notion of your content volume.

While a Veeva Essentials package for PromoMats will work excellent for most, it’s not a one-size-fits all; there are considerations needed for your particular business to maximize the potential of the platform. Marketing Ops leaders should take reviewer structure and the process coordination functions that support them into account when enabling technologies throughout their lifecycle.  

2. Process Efficiency:

At the heart of any Material Review implementation is the MLR (Medical, Legal, Regulatory) review process. Ensuring this process is well-designed to support the pieces for launch as well as the volume of reapprovals your team will encounter is key. Further, the enablement of more advanced concepts like modular content further along in the lifecycle of the tool is also key. The workflows and automation of the Veeva PromoMats tool can only take an organization so far if approval lead times are long and content organization and review is not streamlined. Marketing Ops leaders should align with their MLR counterparts on both the regular and expedited approval flows before configuration start to avoid configuring something that isn’t prepared for scale. Considerations of timeline, simultaneous versus sequential review, and tool optimization, such as automation, should also be made.

3. System Connectivity:

While many implement marketing material review systems like Veeva PromoMats to stay compliant, it’s the Vault platform’s link to Veeva CRM, Digital Asset Management, and other solutions in the Veeva Commercial Suite that create a seamless experience across the commercial organization. Keeping the module interactions, overlaps, and connections at the forefront of system selections and configuration decisions will support Suite optimization and unlock its full potential. For example, the connection between PromoMats and Veeva CRM allows sales teams to have easy access to approved materials that are ready to go when engaging with clients, bolstering customer engagement.  

Marketing Ops leaders should keep claims repositories and digital asset management libraries – the ‘plumbing’ to make modular and auto-publishing work down the line – top of mind to set their investment up for success. They should also align with their Commercial Ops and IT counterparts on the field force enablement roadmap to better understand the opportunities to serve content directly within the CRM suite and provide iterative feedback within the Veeva Closed Loop Marketing (CLM) capabilities.  

4. Project Management:

Like all implementations of new tools and software, strong project management is critical to success. Organizing stakeholders, internal resources, and project teams can always be a challenge, but the role of project management begins before the actual implementation takes place. Moving from a different MLR tool or an in-house solution may require a change in existing SOPs and the creation of new ones. As the technology aims to streamline the MLR process, communication and interaction between the review team will change. 

It’s vital that you have SOPs in place or designed that the tool will help facilitate. People often look to out-of-the-box tool configurations to dictate SOPs, but the process should lead tech – not the other way around. Understanding people, process, and tech, is crucial in a successful Veeva PromoMats implementation.  

Knowing the intricacies of existing processes facilitates ease of integration of the new technologies, ensuring they align with the workflow and enhance productivity. Additionally, a deep understanding of the technology itself enables the project manager to foresee challenges, optimize functionalities, and ultimately drive a successful implementation that meets both organizational goals and user needs. 

Ensuring a Successful Veeva PromoMats Implementation 

To enable a smooth Veeva PromoMats implementation, Marketing Ops leaders should focus on ensuring the people, process, and technology decisions are in place to shape the system requirements. While material review is instrumental to an organization’s ability to stay compliant, its role in the ecosystem of commercial systems can enable a seamless movement of content from the marketer to the field team and a feedback loop on content performance.  

Interested in finding out how a Veeva PromoMats solution fits into the digital backbone for commercial launch? Reach out to our Veeva experts for guidance.