How Lilly ExploR&D saved over $975,000 in avoided sourcing costs
Diligent Results
$975,000+
In avoided sourcing costs.
6,500
Hours saved, freeing 5 full-time equivalents.
2-week
Average turnaround per custom RFI.
"If a Vendor is not in the Diligent database, we won't be exposed to your capabilities and be able to consider you for your services moving forward."
About Lilly ExploR&D
Eli Lilly and Company is a global pharmaceutical leader dedicated to discovering, developing, and delivering innovative medicines. Lilly ExploR&D operates as their external innovation engine, supporting emerging biotechs worldwide to accelerate groundbreaking science from early stages through proof of concept development.
To advance these programs, ExploR&D partners with the most qualified Contract Research Organizations (CROs) and Clinical Research Units (CRUs) worldwide. The ability to recommend the right CRO partner became increasingly critical to their mission of helping scientific innovators bring new medicines to patients faster.
The Challenge
Lilly ExploR&D plays a critical role in advising biotech clients on CRO selection, recommending the right partner based on trial expertise, therapeutic capabilities, and track record. As their client base grew, they needed a more efficient, data-driven way to make these recommendations.
The challenge: the global CRO landscape includes over 1,000 potential partners with no centralized way to identify and track which vendors were best suited for specific trials. Building a qualified vendor pool from scratch for each therapeutic area meant endless hours of research, outreach, and data collection. By the time potential CROs were identified and vetted, valuable months had passed.
The team faced limited visibility across 1,000+ global CROs, manual burden requiring custom outreach through disparate spreadsheets and email chains, resource constraints that prevented proactive category builds, scattered data living in silos, and inconsistent evaluations without standardized templates or risk scoring.
The Solution
Lilly ExploR&D partnered with Diligent to transform their vendor discovery and qualification approach.
Comprehensive Vendor Discovery: Using Diligent's Discovery engine, the team conducted a category build of the global CRO market, focusing on Phase 1 CRU capabilities. 70 high-priority CROs were onboarded through proactive outreach campaigns and sent targeted RFIs. Diligent created three tailored RFI templates specific to Lilly's therapeutic categories, ensuring consistent data collection.
Streamlined Execution & Risk Analysis: Lilly executed 200+ RFIs through Diligent360, launching requests to multiple vendors simultaneously. Diligent provided expert-led risk scoring of responses, analyzing operational red flags before Lilly's review—equipping them with clear, risk-based recommendations.
Strategic Insights: RFI data was delivered in a custom dashboard, providing a centralized view of the global CRO landscape and enabling data-driven vendor comparisons.
The Results
The results were immediate and substantial:
$975,000+ in avoided sourcing costs that would have been required to build this vendor category internally
6,500 hours saved, freeing five full-time equivalents for higher-value strategic initiatives
2-week average turnaround per RFI, reducing qualification timelines from months to days
Improved decision quality with proactive compliance concern identification and data-driven recommendations
Scalable, repeatable process creating a single source of truth for future vendor category builds
Start your next trial faster with higher quality and compliance.
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