Visual Six Sigma, 2nd Edition

Chapter 8Informing Pharmaceutical Sales and Marketing

Six Sigma is often positioned as a project-based approach. Certainly, using identifiable and well-defined projects aligns well with approaches to managing change, and change management can be an important aspect in spreading the use of data within a company. But, insofar as Visual Six Sigma makes data analysis lean, it has an important role to play both within companies whose operations and organizations do not (or cannot) support the traditional project infrastructure, as well as for projects that, by their nature, do not require a formal project structure. This scenario looks at one such “project” set in one such company.

You have recently been hired as the sales manager for PharmaInc and are now responsible for their U.K. operations. PharmaInc markets drugs that address several therapeutic areas. Although you have a lot of sales experience, as a new hire you are still learning about how PharmaInc's own sales operations run and perform.

Executive management perceives that PharmaInc has lost ground recently. Consequently, you have been asked to look into the performance of your sales force. Specifically, you have been asked to:

• Verify the claims of the marketing group that a limited promotion they ran for PharmaInc's major product from May through December of 2014 was very successful.
• Determine whether there are regional differences in the sales performance of PharmaInc's major product.

In addition, you see this as an ...