How a clinical-stage biotech saved 150+ weeks in RFI turnaround time

About the Client

A commercial-stage pharmaceutical company specializing in treatments for rare neurological diseases, that is advancing multiple pipeline programs with first-in-class and best-in-class potential.

The Challenge

As a small quality team, time and resource strain became an issue while qualifying vendors for ongoing trials. The company needed to quickly qualify clinical vendors, while maintaining rigorous compliance standards for their global network of Vendors.

The traditional vendor qualification method meant unnecessary time spent on RFI requests, with outdated tools and questions that needed to be updated to reflect new regulations, It also meant heavy workloads while qualifying vendors, meaning more strain placed on their already small team. Without the ability to add more people to their team, they needed a solution that could help alleviate this workload and save crucial time from the qualification process.

The Solution: Diligent Pharma  

The company partnered with Diligent Pharma to transform their vendor qualification approach:

• Rapid RFI Collection: They leveraged completed qualification questionnaires from Diligent's platform to evaluate vendor capabilities, with RFIs returned in days rather than weeks or months. 

• RFI Builder: Using our RFI builder, the team were able to create, manage, and send RFIs at scale, saving time and effort spent on spreadsheets and manual formatting.

• Immediate Access to Existing Audits: Instead of scheduling new audits and waiting months, they accessed readily available audit reports from Diligent's VendorBase for vendors already qualified by Diligent's expert auditors

• Global Team of Expert Auditors: By levereging Diligent's global network of auditors, the team were able to request new audits without straining the team's resources, allowing them to reallocate quality resources to more important tasks.

The Results  

In their four year relationship with Diligent, the company achieved: 

• 7-day average RFI turnaround time compared to up to a 4-week industry average.

• 150+ weeks of RFI turnaround time saved versus the traditional method.

• 30+ unique vendors qualified over their 4 year relationship with Diligent.

• $120,000 saved through access to existing audits.