All manufacturing executives must worry about wisely allocating resources. But in pharmaceuticals, mistakes come at particularly high costs. Back the wrong product with big commercialization dollars, and the results can be uneven flow in the drug pipeline, hundreds of millions of lost investment dollars and years of lost development time, says a pharmaceutical product commercialization study from Cutting Edge Information, a Durham, N.C.-based research firm. Some 75% of surveyed executives identified long-term resource allocation as their chief challenge, says the report, which includes metrics and detailed analysis of commercial spending, resource allocation processes and decision-making processes at such companies as Eli Lilly, Novartis, Sanofi-Aventis and Bristol-Myers Squibb. "Pharma companies are given the perplexing chore of allocating resources among compounds at their earliest stages," says Jon Hess, a senior analyst at Cutting Edge Information. "This is a daunting task as there is no set answer, but companies can learn from competitors' tactics and their own experiences to eventually shape a process that works best for them."
