The visible operational impact of our CARA platform is driving impressive and accelerating growth across regulated industries, particularly Life Sciences, at a time when digital process transformation is soaring up the strategic agenda.
Crucially, this growth is as much organic within our clients now as it is with new customers. That’s as organisations realise the numerous advantages of basing extended, cross-functional processes on the same single platform. With CARA, teams along a connected business process can draw on the same, live and continuously refreshed repository of knowledge and approved content.
It’s in this context that I have recently moved from a position as Project Manager (working at the coal face of Generis’ CARA implementations for the last five years) to the role of Strategic Customer Success Manager. In this new role, I will be in a fantastic position to share best practice, including scope for embedding CARA more deeply in an enterprise, to drive maximum value from both the platform and the growing ecosystem of rich, integrated applications that run across it.
Challenging customers to think big
Far from being a sales or account management role, the purpose of a customer success manager – certainly at Generis – is to ensure that our software truly becomes the foundation for digital business process transformation, removing human blockers and breaks in system continuity.
This will allow business processes – and supporting data and documents – to flow more seamlessly between adjacent functions and teams.
It’s a hugely cost-effective way to manage operations – and, indeed, software. In the modern cloud age, software-as-a-service (SaaS) deployment has become the de facto means of accessing the latest and most transformational capabilities, quickly and affordably. So why wouldn’t you keep building on this model to deliver more – especially if you can do this from the same base licence, without driving up costs?
When German biotech Affimed recently signed up to our CARA Life Science Platform, from the outset, its vision was to support R&D teams with integrated workflows right across the product development lifecycle. This is exactly the kind of model I want to help all our clients move towards, depending on their priorities and strategic aims.
At Generis, we know just how critical the need to overhaul everyday Clinical, Safety, Quality and Regulatory processes has become in a challenging market, and we’re keen to ensure that all of our clients realise just how far CARA can take them on this journey.
The art of listening: a company & platform built in step with our customers
The reason we’re able to deliver so much more for our customers is that our product development is intrinsically driven by and based on direct feedback from our client base.
What you might not realise is that CARA itself stems from a customer project – for global biopharmaceutical company Bristol Myers Squibb (BMS) some 20 years ago. Two decades on, BMS is still full of praise for Generis and our willingness to listen and adapt to a continually-changing market and the evolving needs of our customers.
We are, and always have been, a company that genuinely wants to know what our customers need from us.
Low code, high levels of support
In CARA, we have a highly flexible platform as most of you will have experienced. But offering low-code software that business teams can adapt to their needs does not mean that we leave users to their own devices. Another key facet to my role is making sure our customers feel fully supported and have an easy and open line of communication to our experts.
Commercially, it stands to reason that a company like ours, which favours a cloud-based SaaS deployment model, would invest heavily in the customer experience. We are not in the business of simply selling a one-time product licence and moving on. Our customer loyalty depends on companies choosing to stay with us, because of the clear value we represent to them – value which we are continuously refreshing and building on.
Connecting people & amplifying best practice
As customer success manager, I am hugely investing in ensuring that the experience of our customers is as rich and complete as it can be: and that’s from a perspective far beyond any immediate client project.
I’m also keen to serve as a visible point of contact – between both Generis and each customer, and between our customers and their peers.
As companies build on CARA’s potential, standardising business processes across multiple functional areas, they are experiencing and demonstrating a wide range of benefits. Once people are able to access and harness the same information across use cases ranging from Regulatory, Safety and Quality to Clinical Trial Management, the return on investment multiplies.
Certainly, our end-to-end platform approach to data and document management isn’t just much more streamlined from an operational perspective: it’s also extremely cost-efficient. With CARA, each user can access the whole range of functionality under their existing licence: they don’t have to pay for additional functionality.
So it’s not surprising that now a whole range of customers are looking to extend the benefits they’ve already experienced.
Watch out for some inspirational webinars
In 2022, we’ll be ramping up webinar and conference activity to showcase the possibilities for extending CARA across cross-functional processes, to transform end-to-end workflow and promote timelier and more reliable data and content exchange between teams.
There are timely reasons to step up digital process transformation now, too. In life sciences, the evolving Regulatory landscape is driving new urgency around smarter and more efficient data/document management. IDMP and SPOR requirements in particular are proving a huge catalyst for change, and Generis CARA for Life Science supports a range of rich, readily-integrated solutions to underpin this. Keeping our customers well informed is another critical aspect of my job and one I’m very committed to.
I look forward to working with you in 2022, to ensuring that CARA is – and remains – everything that you need it to be.
Emilie Blich
