Global Insights, Analytics, and Forecasting Director

at  AstraZeneca

At AstraZeneca, we pride ourselves on crafting a collaborative culture that champions knowledge-sharing, ambitious thinking and innovation – ultimately providing employees with the opportunity to work across teams, functions and even the globe.
Recognizing the importance of individualized flexibility, our ways of working allow employees to balance personal and work commitments while ensuring we continue to create a strong culture of collaboration and teamwork by engaging face-to-face in our offices 3 days a week. Our head office and BlueSky Hub in downtown Toronto are purposely designed with collaboration in mind, providing space where teams can come together to strategize, brainstorm and connect on key projects.
Our dedication to sustainability is also central to our culture and part of what makes AstraZeneca a great place to work. We know the health of people, the planet and our business are interconnected which is why we’re taking ambitious action to tackle some of the biggest challenges of our time, from climate change to access to healthcare and disease prevention.
AstraZeneca is organized around two core business units: BioPharmaceuticals (BBU) and Oncology. The BBU focuses on development and commercialization of AstraZeneca’s Respiratory, Immunology, Cardiovascular, Metabolic, Renal, and Infectious Disease therapeutic areas.
Global Insights, & Business Excellence (GIBEx) is a strategic function, critical for enabling success in the growth of the BBU business. Our ambition is to build an industry-leading organization, empowering our Commercial teams through the generation of compelling evidence and insights, while ensuring they have the tools and skills to deliver impactful launches that change the practice of medicine for the benefit of patients. Within GIACE, the Insights, Analytics, and Forecasting (IA&F) function is organized across two teams and supports both the US and Global organizations: Respiratory & Immunology IA&F, and CVRM (Cardiovascular, Renal, Metabolic) IA&F.

TEAM OVERVIEW:

The Global Insights, Analytics & Forecasting team serves as a strategic business partner to the Global Commercial Biopharma Business Unit, providing market insights that drive launch and in-line brand performance, global strategy and key commercial investment decisions.
Together we strive to uncover deep customer insights to drive improved decision-making and business impact. We are looking for leaders who have the passion to drive business results and bring innovation to what we do for greater impact.

REQUIRED EXPERIENCE:

• Strong revenue forecasting experience utilizing epidemiology-based methodologies
• Familiarity with medical claims (open or closed) or electronic health record databases, IQVIA Rx and sales data, and other syndicated data.
• Proficiency in extracting and interpreting insights from large longitudinal data sources, such as Claims, EMR and other patient level data sets.
• Experience with MS Office products - Excel and PowerPoint skills.
• Advanced modelling skills using Visual Basic, Power BI, SQL+ R or Python are desirable.
• Excellent communication and influencing skills, combined with strong leadership and interpersonal skills and demonstrated ability to work with senior business leaders and cross-functional business partners
• Strategic and critical thinking with the ability to engage, build and maintain credibility with Commercial Leadership teams.
• Ability to manage a diverse range of simultaneous projects, timelines, and priorities with both internal stakeholders and external vendors.
• Capability in applying and deploying deep technical skills and knowledge (e.g., modelling capabilities, CVRM disease insights, or data expertise) across IA&F functional areas

EDUCATIONAL REQUIREMENTS:

• Bachelor’s degree from an accredited college or university
• An advanced degree is preferred (Master’s, MBA, or PhD)
• 5+ years of experience in Pharmaceutical / Biotech / Healthcare analytics or secondary data analysis and forecasting

THE ROLE:

The Global Forecasting Director is expected to provide leadership and strategic direction to deliver competitive advantages through the application of end-to-end insights, analytics, and forecasts across both the Global markets to support AstraZeneca’s industry-leading AstraZeneca pipeline. Our mission as a team is to accelerate business impact through insights and capability transformation. To achieve this, the Global Insights & Forecasting team is tasked with delivering excellence in market research, customer and competitor insights, analytics, and forecasting.
In addition to strong analytical and forecasting skills, the Global Forecasting Lead should have excellent communication skills with a demonstrated track record of effective business partnership as demonstrated by material business impact and influencing. This position may be required to manage contractors and vendors to complete projects, but will have no direct reports. The candidate will also be required to continuously evaluate new quantitative analytics methods, technologies, and datasets.
This role works closely with Therapy Area Commercial, CI, Finance, Commercial Excellence, Medical, Market Access and Pricing, and other senior business partners throughout the organisation.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES:

• Serve as functional subject matter expert in established market and disease areas of interest to the Global Commercial team.
• Summarize and present findings through various communication channels; be able to “tell the story” to senior commercial and clinical stakeholders
• Construct patient-based forecast models in Excel that leverage credibly bold and ambitious data inputs synthesized from a variety of primary and secondary sources, and benchmarked against internal and external analogs
• Instill and reinforce a culture of continuous improvement, learning, testing, and deployment of new capabilities for the business
• Access and evaluate appropriate information via a variety of internal and external tools and sources
• Monitor the external environment to stay up to date on leading analytics and forecasting capabilities, both within and outside of pharma, which can be applied within the organization