How Modular Sped Up a Pharma Team by 40% in eDetailer Development 

“Will it make my work easier or just different?” This is the kind of question you often hear from teams going through digital transformation. Even when challenges are persistent and complex, they are familiar and therefore do not feel urgent.

The client, a large pharmaceutical company, had experimented with several content platforms to speed up eDetailing development. Once they settled with eWizard, they wanted to see quick, measurable results to motivate the teams to embrace the change. The brand asked for proof of concept (PoC) in the form of a one-month pilot.

Challenge: Modular Never Quite Worked

A single eDetailer with up to 20 slides usually took around 14 days to develop. And this was only the build time. On top of that came scope definition, approvals, testing, and deployment. It’s a lot of time for a single interactive visual aid that is likely to need an update in two months.

The client had already tried to improve this process. They had experience working with other platforms and had experimented with a modular approach. But none of these attempts delivered results strong enough to turn into a success story or a case study worth sharing.

They tried to modularize all their content, which resulted in a cluttered digital asset management (DAM) system that marketers could hardly navigate. As a result, strategy adoption ended up on life support.

Marketing teams did not have enough time to actually create content, pressed with strategic work. Even when they went through onboarding with other modular content solutions, the change still did not happen.

So, they continued delegating content production to creative agencies. When they needed to create completely new content to keep HCPs engaged, this partnership often made sense resource-wise.

But when only a small design change or a minor update was needed, it quickly ate up time and money. You have to allocate resources for back and forth with agencies and their production cycles.

Local teams were not ready to adopt modular, no matter what global teams did. Global content was often irrelevant for local realities, and most of the materials were created from scratch. Sometimes, local markets were simply not ready to wait when global teams would provide their content, as they had their own timelines and deadlines.

When the content was ready, marketers had to wait for the IT team to deploy it. That meant it could take around three days to deploy a single 20-slide eDetailer.

Once the content went live, teams struggled to understand what was working and what wasn’t. Without the right key performance indicators in place, they couldn’t pinpoint which modules were worth reusing and which weren’t.

Solution: eDetailing Development Automation

Our goal was to make pharma marketers independent from us, from creative agencies, and from IT. We introduced eWizard, a content platform designed for a modular approach, and guided the team step by step to navigate the solution and put the modular approach into practice.

Since marketers didn’t have the bandwidth for eDetailing development, we provided two options: digital content factory (DCF) when they needed to create fresh, engaging stories, and eWizard when materials could be reused.

Step 1. Getting strategic

We started with a content audit, performance tracking, and planning to see what could be modularized. We focused on the pieces that could be reused across markets, brands, and channels, pruning the DAM and making modular adoption much easier.

Step 2. Ensuring better UX

Even with so many modules in a separate system, marketers needed a way to find them fast or know they were there at all. Our platform showed previews in the sidebar, while AI analyzed the content they were working on and surfaced the right modules instantly.

To speed up creation for busy marketers, eWizard automatically adapted “designless” or bold modules from the DAM to each channel, following the design system rules. This sped up pharma eDetailing and made it easy for content creators to reuse modules without having to memorize them.

Step 3. Boosting local content reuse

Most global content didn’t apply to local markets, so we didn’t expect teams to localize an entire eDetailer. Using our platform, they could automatically localize modules along with assets, creating a local library of modules ready to reuse anytime.

Step 4. Getting measured, getting done

We treated modular as a cycle, not a linear process. Just like an employee’s inbox is never zero, content is never really done. We kept circling back to measure results and see what worked and what didn’t. But first, we had to agree on what “good content” even means, and define the right KPIs.

Step 5. Ditching IT for deployment

Viseven’s content platform is no-code, so even creators without an IT background could build and deploy eDetailers. The team simply dragged and dropped modules and blocks, while the platform enforced the design system automatically, making every piece feel like them.

Outcomes

Instead of a big-bang transformation, the client ran a one-month pilot to see quick results and build team confidence. In just four weeks, they optimized the most painfully lengthy stage, content creation, by 35%, and trimmed 22% off deployment.

Since people naturally resist change, seeing these results helped build excitement around the project and the new tech, as well as the confidence needed to scale and sustain the transformation.

One year later, the pharma company had improved their build time by 40%. And by removing their dependency on the IT department, the team nearly doubled their speed, shipping content 49% faster than before.

Our Takeaway

Many life sciences brands are quick to conclude that modular content doesn’t work and should be retired for good. Yet, most of them never implemented it the right way.

Modular only works when strategy, technology, and people are aligned. When there’s no friction in the system and processes. When both global and local marketers know what to modularize, how to do it fast, and how to work without constant dependencies on other teams.

If you’re struggling with content production, experimenting with modular, or trying to make a change stick, this is the kind of problem we work on.