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26 Feb 2025
In the life sciences industry, delivering personalized, compliant, and scalable content is more critical than ever. With increasing complexity in regulations and growing demands from both patients and healthcare professionals, life sciences companies face enormous pressure to keep their communication streamlined, efficient, and impactful across global markets.
In 2022, Boehringer Ingelheim embarked on a transformative journey to revolutionize its content production process. Faced with the increasing demand for personalized, compliant, and scalable content across various markets, Boehringer partnered with Indegene to transform their modular content strategy. The goal was simple yet ambitious: to deliver the right message to the right audience at the right time while maximizing efficiency, minimizing manual effort, and maintaining compliance.
This blog post explores the challenges, solutions, and outcomes of this partnership, showcasing how Indegene’s expertise helped Boehringer transform its content ecosystem into a streamlined, automated, and scalable model.
Rethinking Content Production at Scale: The Core Objectives
In life sciences, delivering accurate and timely information to patients, healthcare professionals (HCPs), and stakeholders is critical. However, traditional content production models were proving inefficient for Boehringer’s global scale, leading to delays, higher costs, and compliance risks. To address these challenges, Boehringer set out to achieve three key objectives with Indegene:
Maximize reuse: The ability to reuse content across regions, markets, and channels was essential to scaling efficiently
Scale content creation: Boehringer needed to generate compliant content at scale while maintaining high-quality standards
Content automation: Reducing manual intervention was critical for speeding up content production, lowering costs, and improving consistency.
Together, Boehringer and Indegene identified a modular content strategy as the foundation for this transformation. However, they quickly realized that this shift would not be confined to content production alone—it required a cultural and operational transformation across the organization.
From Idea to Impact: The Modular Content Transformation Journey
Phase 1: Strategic alignment
The first step of the journey involved aligning the vision across all key stakeholders, including representatives from corporate, regional markets, and partners like Indegene and Veeva. Through a series of collaborative workshops and brainstorming sessions, a clear roadmap was developed, focusing on transforming Boehringer’s content ecosystem across three key pillars: people, processes, and technology.
The core principle was to implement a modular content strategy that would not only streamline content production but also improve compliance and enable automation at scale. The teams identified key stakeholders across various departments, including Medical, Legal, and Regulatory (MLR) teams, Agency of Record (AOR), omnichannel analytics, and technology vendors, to ensure a holistic approach to the transformation.
Key Learnings:
A successful modular content strategy requires transforming people, processes, and technology simultaneously
Engaging a diverse set of stakeholders early in the process helps capture market-specific needs, avoiding a one-size-fits-all approach.
Phase 2: Process and Technology Integration
With the vision in place, the next step was to implement the technology and processes necessary to bring the modular content strategy to life. Indegene and Boehringer focused on interlocking the entire content value chain, ensuring seamless integration between tools and platforms to enable end-to-end automation. The Veeva PromoMats system was adapted to be modular content-ready, with downstream systems such as Indegene’s Next Commercial Content Intelligence (NCCI) authoring platform fully integrated.
This involved developing smart templates, channel matrices, stylized content modules, and simplified approval documents that ensured compliance without overwhelming the review process. Automating as much of the content production process as possible was key to reducing human intervention, increasing speed, and improving consistency.
Key Learnings:
Seamless technology integration is essential to making the process efficient. The less manual intervention, the better the system functions.
Compliance must be woven into the modular content strategy, ensuring that review and approval processes are streamlined for faster turnaround.
Phase 3: Pilot Testing and Early Wins
Once the systems were set up, it was time to test the new modular content approach in a controlled environment. Boehringer and Indegene selected the US market and a respiratory brand as the pilot focus. The pilot involved creating 12 content modules and a single template, which were used to auto-generate 50 personalized, compliant emails.
The results were highly encouraging. The modular content approach proved to be effective, allowing the teams to produce high-quality, compliant emails quickly and efficiently. This successful pilot laid the groundwork for scaling the system across other brands and markets.
Key Learnings:
Running a non-live pilot campaign helps refine the system before going live, minimizing risks and pressure.
Early-stage customization and recalibration are crucial for ensuring smooth market-specific implementation.
Phase 4: Global Adoption and Change Management
As of 2024, Boehringer is focused on expanding the adoption of its modular content strategy across global markets. The US market has already onboarded several brands, experiencing a significant reduction in production costs and turnaround times. Adoption efforts are now extending to Middle Eastern markets, with ongoing training and change management initiatives to ensure a smooth transition.
Indegene has helped ensure that all stakeholders—from AORs to MLR teams—are fully trained and aligned with the new ways of working. The global rollout is expected to continue throughout 2024, with full adoption anticipated by mid-2025.
Key Learnings:
It’s essential to start modular content transformation with a mature brand rather than a launch brand. Established brands with existing tactics are better suited for early-stage adoption.
A phased, incremental approach to global adoption works best, allowing teams to document learnings, make necessary adjustments, and drive adoption across different market archetypes.
Overcoming Challenges and Navigating Complexities
While the journey was successful, it wasn’t without its challenges. Boehringer and Indegene encountered several hurdles along the way:
Customization vs. standardization: Different markets have different content creation and approval processes. Striking a balance between standardization and local customization was key to ensuring the system worked across diverse markets.
Undocumented processes: Some markets had informal or undocumented workflows that posed challenges during automation. Extensive interviews, document reviews, and user acceptance testing (UAT) helped mitigate these risks.
Component harvesting and tagging: Building a library of high-quality content modules required detailed metadata tagging to improve searchability and reusability.
MLR approval processes: Streamlining the approval process to avoid lengthy review cycles while maintaining compliance was a significant challenge. Developing a concise, effective approval document was key to solving this issue.
Future Vision: Key Takeaways for Content Transformation
Boehringer Ingelheim’s journey highlights critical takeaways for any organization looking to scale content production efficiently. As the industry continues to adapt to digital transformation, modular content offers a path to greater efficiency, compliance, and agility. Key lessons include:
Start with a clear vision: Align stakeholders across functions early to ensure the approach fits organizational goals and market needs.
Prioritize content automation: Technology integration that reduces manual effort is essential for scaling efficiently while maintaining quality.
Pilot and iterate: Testing on a smaller scale before a broader rollout helps mitigate risks and refine the process for greater success.
Balance standardization with flexibility: Finding the right mix between global processes and local market customization ensures both scalability and relevance.
For life sciences organizations operating in highly regulated or content-heavy environments, adopting modular content principles and an efficient digital content strategy can provide a competitive edge. It’s not just about producing more content, it's about producing smarter, more compliant, and highly reusable content that resonates across channels and markets.
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