Staying organized and disciplined in outsourcing has been a pain point for too many people for far too long. Inefficient manual processes such as multiple email handovers, company shared folders, contracting, and procure-to-pay systems, involving long hours and duplicate efforts, creating headaches for both Sponsors and Service Providers.
A simpler, more structured RFP process starts with better sourcing event administration.
SOURCE is the hub for all your R&D procurement needs. Our RFP organization, sourcing event and bid dashboards drive extra efficiency into your routine. Easy-to-read, filter and search screens will keep you informed of your current project status, tasks, notifications, bidder activity, messages, and more.
We engaged some of the world’s leading experts in clinical outsourcing and proposal management to help us define the best possible standardized templates for clinical outsourcing. You can use them “out of the box” or create your own.
R&D procurement is notoriously non-standard.
Emerging sponsors use service provider bid grids, advocating that mapping to standard bid grids takes away the individuality of the CRO. However, bid due diligence becomes daunting because sponsors themselves must then do the mapping in absence of the common bid format.
Large biopharma companies employ their own standard, but again, only achieve standardization through extensive mapping efforts with the CROs.
The CROs face the formidable effort of mapping to every “standard bid grid.”
With SOURCE you can:
Adopt Industry Best Standards
A complete task library with standardized activities to streamline the clinical outsourcing process.
Mapping configurator so you can match Service Provider bids grids to Clinical Maestro’s or your own.
Save RFP Management Time
Easy-to-create reusable templates that can be customized to your needs.
Increase Transparency
Custom template management options to accommodate your unique preferences.
Bid grid templates are constantly evolving and the Strategikon experts strive to keep you at the forefront of the industry’s standardization efforts. We engage with both Sponsors and Service Providers to align assumptions, tasks, and nomenclature. The result is greater transparency in bidding and less mapping effort by both Sponsors and Service Providers, all contributing to lower cost of outsourcing.
Clinical Maestro SOURCE offers a procurement experience that drives both vendor and internal stakeholder engagement to complete projects faster and with greater efficiency.
Working together in a common digital space is paramount for team efficiency, especially in the post-pandemic environment where many are still working remotely. Sponsors need a central view of activities performed by internal teams, and tactical or strategic partners. Communication is often lost in emails, in-line comments for budget items and undocumented phone conversations.
SOURCE empowers all stakeholders in the RFP process to interact and communicate in a common, traceable environment to ensure transparent collaboration:
Collaboration Platform
Service Providers are invited to the system and create their own profile. Service Providers can access bid opportunities, as well as current and historical records.
Role-Based Access
Sponsors can manage collaboration through role-based access. Internal stakeholders can view each other’s workload and RFP status.
Communication Logs
Stakeholders can post in-line comments for assumptions, budget justification, and any open items. Comments can be shared internally or externally.
Communication is threaded and saved in comment logs that fully document conversations through the different stages of bidding.
Communication throughout the bidding process is not lost in emails, trackers, and phone conversations. SOURCE retains the RFP conversation for safe-keeping and future reference.
Rate Card management in SOURCE provides greater oversight of clinical service providers, especially strategic CRO partners. Ensuring agreed upon rates are applied to proposals both in variable and fixed bid grid modes.
Accessing vendor profiles, including negotiated agreements, is one pain point that R&D outsourcing experts share with great frequency. Where is everything and why is it so hard to find? Capability data resides in documents, RFIs, emails, and rate cards, which are often in PDF and Excel at MSA level and not easily accessed during the RFP process for verification and enforcement.
Clinical Maestro team members have lived with these frustrations in their careers and decided to change the paradigm.
Rate Card Library
Rate cards are saved and accessed by Sponsors or vendors directly in the system. Sponsors may request that a specific rate card is used at the proposal level, or they can create a study budget using the preferred provider rate card in PORTFOLIO. Rate cards can be compared over time on multiple dimensions, e.g., country or role-level.
Service Capabilities
Vendor profiles are established by vendors upon invitation to SOURCE.
Study Roles
Vendor bidding metrics and performance can be visualized in the context of study performance in VISION.
Vendor profile management allows both Sponsors and CROs to maintain their records. With Clinical Maestro VISION, profile management is further enhanced with governance, performance metrics, and oversight.
We collected hundreds of due diligence questions from both Sponsors and Service Providers, and they are available at your fingertips. The data bank gets smarter with each contribution.
Ever wonder what questions you should ask or what service selection criteria to use during the RFP process? Did the service provider already answer your question? Is the response lost in a workbook? Are you asking too few or too many questions?
No matter your level of sophistication SOURCE has a solution for you:
Adopt Industry Best Standards
Utilize RFP/RFI questions library created from contributions by leading Sponsors and CROs.
Save RFI/RFP Time
Create your own custom libraries for criteria scoring, request management, and due diligence questions. Roll-up your references into re-usable RFP templates.
Central Question Management
If you’d like, give back to the industry by contributing your own know-how to the SOURCE database.
Sponsors and Service Providers contribute to enriching the Questions and Criteria database, saving time and effort during the RFP or qualification process.
SOURCE eliminates the effort to save attachments in company folders and classify them. This protects your team and organization from the risk of losing or not finding important documentation related to vendor selection and preferred partner due diligence.
Competitive vendor selection generates dozens of document attachments circulated by email that need to be saved, stored, and managed for historical legacy and regulatory compliance. However, even the best stored documents can be “lost” due to limited folder and document level searchability of shared drivers. Many relevant documents remain on individual hard drives. How will you ensure no documents are lost in the bidding process and you can successfully withstand a QA or regulatory inspection?
With SOURCE:
Eliminate Email Attachments
Service providers submit documents directly through SOURCE portal; documents, e.g., CVs, 3rd party proposals.
Save Document Management Time
Documents are tagged to the proposals, there is no need to download and save elsewhere.
Central Document Hub
Finding documents associated with bids, bid revisions, or change order is effortless in SOURCE.
Sponsors and Service Providers contribute to enriching the Questions and Criteria database, saving time and effort during the RFP or qualification process.
Read Case study “Budgeting and Sourcing of a Phase 3 Rare Disease Study”
Read Case Study:
The experts at Strategikon developed Clinical Maestro out of a combination of love and frustration. The system was developed and nurtured by financial and clinical business operations executives with both Sponsor and Provider experience. Our founders believed there had to be a better way — and so they created one.
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