Financial data management: achieving 90% user convenience and flexibility

Innowise has developed a convenient system for storing, calculating and editing royalty streams on a quarterly basis.

Customer

Industry

Healthcare, Investment

Region

Client since

2022

The customer is a large biopharmaceutical royalties purchaser that co-funds clinical trials and new product launches in exchange for future royalties and acquires existing royalties from the original innovators.

Detailed information about the client cannot be disclosed under the provisions of the NDA.

Challenge: Overcoming limitations of traditional financial management solutions for streamlining royalty calculation

From academic and commercial laboratories to biopharmaceutical companies manufacturing drugs, royalties often subsidize the entire drug development process. An academic inventor or a small biotechnology company can provide early scientific and development work for a medication that a multinational pharmaceutical company eventually commercializes.

Since 2003, our client has collaborated with innovators at academic institutions, clinics, pharmacies, hospitals, and not-for-profit organizations through small and mid-cap biotechnology companies to leading global pharmaceutical companies. Since many of them lack funding to pursue R&D or get drugs licensed, the customer provides them with cash infusions.

Today, the client has a vast portfolio of dozens active projects, partnering with notable pharmaceutical brands like Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Novartis, and many more.

At the client’s company, each contract represents a royalty stream in an Excel spreadsheet, with net license fees calculated quarterly based on reported sales and royalty rates. Despite being quick and accurate, Excel oftentimes requires much manual work and suffers from slow load times, problems with collaborative work, and the risk of inadvertently deleting essential data. Despite the availability of off-the-shelf financial management solutions, our customer sought a bespoke ERP-like product that would prioritize user-friendliness and swift response times.

Solution: Implementing a customized financial data management solution for effortless royalty stream management

Though the back-end was all on the customer's side, our project team was tasked with ensuring hassle-free API integrations and intuitive UI designs.
In essence, the platform's core function is to calculate the revenue generated from a signed agreement, represented as a royalty stream. As contract terms may change over time, an agreement may need to be split into multiple royalty streams with the same name. Each royalty stream is assigned to a manager who oversees one or more drugs, drug groups, or medical equipment. All data and calculations are stored in MS SQL Server databases, extracted from Excel spreadsheets.
Our main objective was to enhance the application by providing comprehensive interfaces for calculating and monitoring royalty accruals, actual revenue, and cash receipts on a quarterly basis.

USER AUTHORIZATION

Once a user runs the web application from the desktop, they see a splash screen with the logo and authentication option. When users log into the Windows Server, they go through the sign-in procedure using LDAP authentication (request-response protocol). Upon granting access to a customer (after entering login and password), the access token is created. To ensure security, sessions are set to expire after 12 hours of inactivity, with the customer receiving a warning 5 minutes before expiration. At this point, they will be redirected to the splash screen, where they will need to re-enter their login and password information.

LOYALTY STREAMS

When a user selects a royalty entity, they are directed to a user interface where they can access relevant values and calculations specific to the selected agreement.

Previously, marketer press releases were obtained manually from corporate sources to retrieve data on drug sales every quarter. However, the new system automatically retrieves this data, allowing users to observe the result of a cash flow calculation on a quarterly basis. The number of periods (years and quarters) that can be viewed on the screen depends on the resolution.

The system has four user roles – admin (manages access and gives permissions), system admin (system technical owner), editor (enters data and does calculations), and viewer (oversees information and downloads reports without editing powers).

Upon logging in, users can select a royalty entity, view information, edit values, add comments, copy and paste data, search for information using built-in filters, and forecast projected values for future periods. The drug sales data are categorized by region, providing critical information about the stream, including the market location, start and end date, ID, and active or expired status.

The system is compatible with major browsers such as Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Firefox, and Safari, and can support between 4-10 users simultaneously. Additionally, it can scale up to 200 users if required.

Technologies & tools

Front-end

React.JS

Back-end

Golang

Database

MS SQL Server

VCS

GitHub

DevOps

Ansible, GitHub Actions, Nginx, Docker, Docker Compose, Ubuntu

Process

Following the signing of the contract, the client initiated a comprehensive onboarding process to ensure a clear understanding of their domain, knowledge transfer, and team readiness for the development phase. Innowise dedicated two weeks to this process, holding kick-off meetings, discussing the project management approach, elaborating the statement of work, communication strategy, reporting, onboarding sessions, and daily calls.

Once the onboarding stage was completed, our business analyst clarified the project requirements in detail. Based on these requirements and the customer’s prototype sketches, a UI/UX designer developed the prototypes. Our React developer advised on the suitable tech stack and suggested technical details such as library investigation. The PM created project tasks in Jira, and the client’s PO verified them.

Following the onboarding stage, Innowise provided the following artifacts:

project timeline and the scope of work;
statement of work (SOW);
work breakdown structure (WBS);
specifications and designs;
UI toolkit;
software development environments and tools to manage the project;
LDAP service.

We demonstrated a full-fledged MVP with killer features during the development stage. Our project team stayed in touch with the customer throughout the project, accommodating changes to the scope and prioritizing tasks based on client feedback.

As of now, the project is ongoing, with our team implementing new features and fixing minor bugs.

Team

Business Analyst

Project Manager

Front-End Developer

UI/UX Designer

DevOps

QA Engineer

Results: Improved convenience, flexibility, and data security

Innowise has developed a user-friendly financial management platform to store cash flows and calculate quarterly royalties. The system provides managers with an interactive and convenient way to track their contracts and monitor cash flow generated from drug sales.

Our dedicated team developed user-side logic and intuitive interfaces, eliminating Excel’s pitfalls. The platform we have built provides a decent level of data traceability, simultaneous collaboration, and separate access based on users’ roles and responsibilities. This immersive financial data management solution enables managers to make accurate, insightful accounting reports without fear of losing or misinterpreting data.

Project duration

June 2022 - Ongoing

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