As a result, Makhfi says the focus of the collaboration is “to combine Savvion's expertise in business process management and Patni’s deep pharmaceutical experience to jointly deliver BPM-enabled solutions to the life sciences industry.” The partnership between Savvion and Patni meets this challenge by combining Patni’s decades of experience in IT and scientific consulting with Savvion’s 14 years of experience in optimizing and automating business processes.  

 

The outcome of the partnership will assist life sciences organizations in streamlining their drug development and clinical trial operations—all while leveraging their existing information technology infrastructure investments. By optimizing the drug development life cycle, customers will be able to lower the time and cost of delivering compliant, safe and reliable drugs to the marketplace.  

 

The partnership signifies Savvion’s commitment to this market segment, where the company offers targeted Savvion’s “BPM-enabled” applications that allow it to model, simulate, optimize and execute various collaborative clinical operational processes built on top of its robust and proven BPM platform and life sciences foundation.  

 

Makhfi also notes that the collaboration will foster cost and risk reduction “through predictive warnings and timely escalations” and a “reduced cycle-time, increased flexibility and more accurate decisions which result in better resource utilization.”

 

Roy Devine, associate vice president of consulting services at Patni, says Savvion proved to be a good partner for Patni because of its “support for security and life sciences standards, as well as the open architecture, frameworks and business accelerators that are life science industry-specific for quick ROI and deployment of clinical operations solutions.”  

 

Devine also notes that drug trial managers face myriad challenges.  

 

“They must deal with expiring drug patents, dwindling drug pipelines, escalating costs of clinical trials, and increasingly stringent new regulatory guidelines that delay time to market,” he says. “This new partnership will enhance Patni’s consulting practice by allowing us to offer Savvion’s pioneering BPM technology along with Patni’s regulatory and IT expertise to help our clients remain competitive.”

 

Makfhi notes that the agreement does signal an expanded commitment by Savvion in the area of CROs.  

 

“As part of our strategic focus, we are fully committed to the life sciences industry,” he says. “We are aggressively expanding our capabilities and programs to support an industry that could greatly benefit from BPM.”

 

Moreover, Makhfi further points out that the partnership opens new doors for Savvion.  

“With Patni’s domain expertise in life sciences and Savvion’s track record for automating complex business processes, we can work together to give the drug industry BPM-enabled solutions to easily meet complex and ever-changing regulatory requirements and shorten the time to market for new drugs.”

 

The collaboration isn’t limited to the CRO space, instead covering the broader pharma and life sciences industry. Makhfi notes that the two companies can work together to help CROs meet new challenges of today’s industry by “adding efficiency, visibility and agility to the business processes and improving overall business performance.”  

 

Gauging success of the collaboration should be a fairly simple effort, concludes Makhfi. The partners are seeking increased visibility into end-to-end processes, anywhere from investigators selection and site setup to patient onboarding, study conduct and closure; cost and risk reduction through predictive warnings and timely escalations; and reduced cycle time, increased flexibility and more accurate decisions which result in better resource utilization.  

 

“All together, we expect our customers to see an average improvement of 30 percent in running clinical trials,” he says. “This may well be in simple savings and cost reduction, but more often, it is a reflection of the increased capacity and efficiency of the processes.”