Sales Intelligence Platform for Pharma: The Ferring Case by Agence

A pharmaceutical multinational with 3,700 users and 400 suppliers spread across the globe increased sales by 60% by replacing scattered spreadsheets with a single sales intelligence platform for pharma.

Ferring's commercial challenge before the platform

Ferring Pharmaceuticals is a global pharmaceutical multinational present in dozens of countries, with a commercial structure that depends on field representatives, distributors and internal departments working in sync. Before the project with Agence, that sync did not really exist. Strategic information about the commercial operation was scattered across local spreadsheets, systems isolated by region, and records that each team kept its own way. Every market operated, in practice, as an island: some countries relied on spreadsheets shared by email, others kept internal systems that never exchanged data with headquarters, and it was not unusual for the same customer to be registered differently in each local operation.

That fragmentation had a direct cost in decision speed. A sales number closed on a Monday in one market only reached global leadership, consolidated, weeks later, once each affiliate finally compiled its own spreadsheet and sent it in for manual consolidation. Three gaps concentrated the problem. There was no standardization in how orders were registered and tracked, which turned every request into a manual, error-prone process. There was no unified customer database, so the same account could show up with different data in different departments. And competitive intelligence depended on each representative's individual perception, with no structured format to turn that perception into information leadership could actually use. Without centralized commercial data, the leadership team made decisions with numbers that were partial, delayed, or simply missing, always one step behind the market.

Why scattered commercial data stalls sales in regulated industries

What Ferring went through is not unique to that company. If your operation sits in pharma, healthcare or industrial manufacturing, you probably recognize the pattern. Representatives, distributors, compliance teams: every link in the chain generates its own record, and nobody has the full picture. Without real-time order status, your own sales team loses visibility over the operation it runs. Without a unified customer database, marketing, sales and after-sales treat the same account with conflicting information, and every mismatch turns into rework or, worse, a wrong decision.

• ✓Orders with no tracking, requiring manual contact to find out what stage they are in
• ✓Customer records fragmented across different departments and systems
• ✓No structured process for evaluating competitors
• ✓Manual processes for field requests and post-event reporting
• ✓Lack of transparency around commercial indicators across departments

Those were exactly the five points Ferring needed to solve before turning data into decisions. None of them is a small problem on its own, but together they form a low ceiling for any pharma sales dashboard strategy that depends on speed and precision. That is why digital transformation in pharma rarely moves forward by simply buying one more standalone tool: the real gain shows up when orders, customer records and competitive intelligence start operating under the same data logic, inside a single decision ecosystem.

The solution: a commercial portal with integrated modules

Agence's answer was not to deliver one more standalone tool for each problem. It was to build a single commercial platform that works as the central hub for Ferring's entire sales operation. Instead of one system for orders, another for customer records and a spreadsheet for competitors, this B2B commercial platform brings everything together under the same data foundation and the same access logic, which alone eliminates much of the rework that defined the old operation.

The real differentiator is not any single one of these modules, it is the integration between them. A field request feeds the customer record, which feeds the sector profile, which in turn informs competitive intelligence. This kind of interconnected architecture is what separates a commercial portal from a set of nicely named spreadsheets. That underlying engineering let Ferring scale the platform to more than 30 modules without losing consistency between them, built on custom web development.

How competitive intelligence works inside the platform

The Competitor Evaluation module gives field teams a structured format to record what they observe in the market: prices being practiced, competitor presence in a given region, relevant commercial moves. That information existed before, but only in a representative's head or in loose notes that rarely reached leadership in an organized way. Standardizing the record is what turns field perception into real commercial intelligence software, and that intelligence is what starts feeding pricing decisions and sales effort allocation by region.

These records do not stay locked inside the module. They feed directly into the Sector Profile and the Customer Profile, giving commercial leadership up-to-date competitive context every time they assess an account or a region. That connection between competitive intelligence and customer records is what turns the platform into a competitive intelligence platform for decisions, not just a repository of field reports. Without that connection, the same competitive data would stay trapped in an isolated module, repeating the same dispersion problem the platform was built to fix.

Order standardization and a unified customer database in practice

On the operational side, the most immediate gain shows up in the order flow. It used to be born differently in every region, and now it follows a single path, from the first field contact to delivery confirmation, with the unified customer database as the reference at every step. That path has five checkpoints, and each one closes one of the gaps Ferring faced before the platform.

1. 1Field Requestthe representative logs the customer's need directly on the platform, already linked to the existing record
2. 2Original Ordersthe order is formalized based on a standardized record, with no re-keying or data mismatches between departments
3. 3Order Statusthe team tracks every stage in real time, without a call or email to find out where an order stands
4. 4Post-Eventthe outcome of events and commercial actions is recorded and linked to the customer's and the sector's history
5. 5Transparency Portalconsolidated indicators are visible to every stakeholder involved in the operation

This closed loop is what guarantees nobody at Ferring needs to ask another department what the right number is anymore. The data lives in the same place, updated the same way, for everyone. And because the unified customer database sits at the base of all five steps, a typing error made at one end of the operation does not spread to the others: it gets corrected once, in the record, and automatically reflects across every module that depends on it.

Results: 60% more sales and over 3,700 active users

The platform now also manages more than 100 million products a year, a volume that only holds up because every order follows the same standardized flow, with no regional exceptions. The 60% increase in sales did not come from technology alone: it came from the combination of trackable orders, reliable customer records and competitive intelligence reaching leadership in time to become a commercial decision.

Before the platform, a good part of the sales team's day was spent asking other departments where an order was stuck or whether a customer record was correct. With Order Status and Customer Registration centralized, that time now goes into serving customers and closing deals. And with Competitor Evaluation feeding the Sector Profile, representatives stopped negotiating in the dark: every visit now carries real competitive context about the region, not just the customer's purchase history. That behavioral shift across the teams, more than any single module, is what sustained the 60% growth in product sales.

If your operation also depends on data that is too scattered to turn into fast action, it is worth understanding where a similar architecture would fit your business and talking to a team that has already structured a project at this scale.

What companies in other industries can learn from the Ferring case

The principle behind the Ferring case is not exclusive to pharma. Unifying orders, customer records and competitive intelligence into a single decision ecosystem applies to healthcare, industrial manufacturing and any other regulated industry that operates with multiple links in its commercial chain. What changes from case to case is scale and the type of automation involved. In the Ambev case, Agence solved a single legal workflow for approving sponsored events, a deep, targeted automation of a specific process. Ferring asked for something different: not one workflow, but an entire ecosystem, with more than 30 modules operating in an integrated way for 3,700 users.

• Your commercial data lives in more than three different sources, with no single point of truth
• You cannot measure the competition systematically, only through informal perceptions from the field team
• Orders have no reliable tracking between registration and delivery
• You have hundreds or thousands of field users generating information that never reaches leadership in a structured way

If you recognize two or more of these signs, the challenge has probably already moved past the point where one more spreadsheet or standalone system fixes it. It is also worth looking at the other end of the spectrum: the Vivo call center case shows how a narrower problem, focused on operations and service, also becomes a measurable gain when tackled with the right method, even without Ferring's multimodular scale.

Frequently asked questions about sales portals and commercial intelligence

Move your project forward with Agence

If scattered commercial data, a lack of order standardization or the difficulty of evaluating your competitors sound familiar, the Ferring case shows the answer is not one more standalone tool, but a commercial portal built around your process, with intelligence applied to every stage of the decision. This is exactly the kind of multimodular, long-term, large-scale project Agence structures for companies in regulated industries.

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