PART V

SUPPLEMENTARY CASE AND CASE NOTES

Zygar Pharmaceuticals

The Start-Up. Zygar Pharmaceuticals was formed in 1970. Two consulting research cardiologists from the Parke-Davis division of Warner Lambert, Dr. Dale R. Fox and Dr. Caren Conners, began the company in Yardley, Pennsylvania. Initially, Zygar was little more than an independent sales office with ten people handling part of the Parke-Davis product line in Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states.

All that changed in 1982 with FDA approval of Zilene, a drug developed and patented by Fox and Conners for patients suffering with coronary artery spasms (angina). The drug interferes with slow inward (depolarizing) electrical currents in myocardial tissues, relaxing the coronary vascular muscles and dilating the coronary arteries. Such a drug was of interest to both cardiologists and general practitioners. Normally, a patient suffering with the symptoms of angina would be referred to a cardiologist. If a drug regime was indicated, the cardiologist would prescribe an antianginal drug and return the patient to the care of her or his primary physician. While the general practitioner usually continued to prescribe the selected drug, he or she could change the prescription if changes in the patient's condition over time warranted.

Because Zilene would compete with several antianginal and antiarrhythmic drugs already produced by Parke-Davis, Drs. Fox and Conners resigned their consulting positions and took Zygar Pharmaceuticals private. Warner Lambert, however, was initially licensed to manufacture Zilene for the start-up company.

Further Growth. While only three salespeople stayed with the new company, by 1990 Zygar's sales organization had grown to 85 sales reps, eight sales managers and one vice president of sales. The vice president, Mr. Alan Machin, was one of the three who stuck with the company after the changeover. In addition to Zilene, by the spring of 1990 Zygar's product line also included one cerebral vasodilator, Gaspar, which was of particular interest to physicians specializing in oncology and internal medicine, one bronchial dilator, Bendine, and two antidepressants.

Zygar's corporate headquarters remained in Yardley, Pennsylvania. However, by early 1990, the company had built one manufacturing facility in the Mercer County, New Jersey, free trade zone and another manufacturing facility in Bloomington, Indiana. A regional sales office (leased) had been positioned in Orange County, California in early 1993. A second regional sales office in Savannah, Georgia is currently under consideration.

Zygar's salespeople are expected to make between six and eight calls a day, including calls on pharmacies. Physicians to be called on are separated by their sales potential (the 1's have the highest potential and the 3's have the lowest), and by how difficult they are to be seen (X's are hardest to see and E's are the easiest). Machin has always liked to see his detailers try and build their schedules around the times the X-1's and M-1's are available, though new doctors are given priority because their potential is unknown. While each salesperson is expected to call on pharmacists to update their doctors "script writing" habits, most of them are too busy filling prescriptions to be seen until late afternoon. Alan has always insisted, however, that sales reps visit pharmacists before calling on a new doctor to get a handle on the physician's prescription writing tendencies so they can better tailor their presentation in the initial "getting acquainted" visit.

In June of 1993, Fox and Conners received FDA approval for Rodine, a new vasodilator. Like Zilene, Rodine acts to depress myocardial irritability and conduction. Like Gaspar, Zygar's cerebral vasodilator, Rodine acts to increase cerebral blood flow as well. However, its primary benefit to patients is that it also safely reduces ventricular arrhythmias. This combination of attributes makes Rodine a drug that can be used not only by cardiologists and general practitioners, but also by surgeons and those specializing in internal medicine. In anticipation of its release, the number of inquiries received by the company about the new drug was phenomenal. Zygar's switchboard was swamped. At Machin's urging, Fox and Conners agreed with his plan to expand the sales force and to hire between ten and fifteen new trainees.

Yet a problem quickly arose. How could Machin efficiently train both new hires and the sales reps in the field about detailing the new drug without a sales meeting of some kind? Zygar's national sales meeting had already been held in New Orleans in February (as it is every year), and Alan knew that Fox and Conners would never authorize a second meeting for the introduction of just one drug. Both Fox and Conners wanted their salespeople to concentrate on "what they got paid for" - - selling. The election of a president who was hostile to the medical community also made many routine expenditures problematic.

In addition, Conners had been pressuring Machin to lower his organization's selling costs. Caren had estimated the cost of putting a Zygar detailer in front of one physician at $280. While the industry average was $300 per visit, Dr. Conners had expressed her concern that Machin's salespeople were spending too much time in the wrong physician's office waiting to see a doctor at the wrong time and reading four year old copies of Gourmet Magazine. Yet since 1991, the company had provided each salesperson with a laptop PC for record-keeping at a cost of $2,200 per unit. Although the software had a basic call-planning program, few of the detailers had mastered it and were using it regularly. Alan knew that he also had to find a way to teach his sales reps to make better use of their time and to use their computers to better advantage.

Finally, one particular sore point was Zygar's focus on meetings and the use of meeting quotas. In order to get in front of more physicians, Machin had encouraged his reps to try and schedule at least two presentations a month with groups of doctors who shared an interest in or tended to prescribe similar types of drugs. Because Zygar was a fairly small company, Machin didn't want his salespeople calling on the same doctor more than twice a year. From his perspective, this would force his detailers to see more doctors with different specializations and result in more complete coverage in each of their rather large territories. Scheduling a breakfast or luncheon meeting at a hospital for six or eight physicians would allow the salesperson to see a doctor more than twice a year. Whether a guest speaker was scheduled or the detailer just gave a quick stand up presentation, the networking opportunities involved would at the very least help build goodwill between the rep and the physicians. Unfortunately, most of Machin's salespeople did not look for the opportunity to arrange meetings when doing their call planning.

Mr. Machin decided to call Dr. William Strahle, managing partner of Time & Territory Management. TTM specializes in handling tour routing and call planning issues. Strahle suggested developing a training diskette for all the Zygar salespeople that could be used by each rep as they waited in a doctor's office for their appointment. Interested, Machin agreed to hear Strahle out. From this point on, reader, you are Alan.

The Meeting. OK Alan, let's turn on your computer. I see it's an IBM compatible. Good, now let the system boot up. At this point, one of your salespeople is likely to need to download the softwareand they should go to the DownLoad web page. But since I have already downloaded the software you should start the program by double clicking the WZygar icon on the screen. After doing this you will see the following screen.

As you can see, Alan, the Tag Along Trainer consists of two major portions, the Day Scheduler and the Week Scheduler.

The Week Scheduler should be used to learn and reinforce priorities for matching locations with the day of the week on which they should be visited. The program reads in a database of physicians and pharmacies and information about these physicians such as their type of practice, the date they were last visited, the drugs they prescribe, and the days and times that they are most accessible. The physicians are already grouped into locations. The program allows the salesperson to decide which locations should be visited on which days and evaluate their decisions. The detailer will be given feedback about the decisions and suggestions about how to query the database for helpful information.

The Day Scheduler assumes that the decisions about which location to visit on each day have been made. Zygar's detailers must schedule the actual appointments using the physicians accessibility, potential, date of the last visit and other information. After scheduling the physicians either through one-on-one contact or meetings and scheduling their meals, they can evaluate their decisions for each day of the week, against the schedules selected by yourself and senior Zygar sales managers. Next your salespeople will be led through a practice walkthrough of the Week and Day Schedulers. They should start by selecting the Week Scheduler hyperlink. Then we will give a description of the screens that may be accessed for information to help them make their decisions.

Some Background About the Program

Hierarchical Decision Processes. We all experience a considerable amount of hierarchical decision making in our lives. For example, we have Federal, State and Local governments all trying to make decisions in concert with each other. It is hoped that at the Federal level they will not overly specify, so as to overly restrict decision making at lower levels. This is not always the case.

In the case of Zygar Pharmaceuticals the firm, and particularly Alan Machin, someone in the firm makes some over arching decisions about which physicians are important to visit. For example, salespeople aren't supposed to visit physicians too frequently. The salespeople are told they should use meetings as a way to bring several physicians together for a variety of purposes. They are supposed to make sure and visit new physicians in order to meet them and learn more about their prescription patterns. At a slightly more detailed level the salespeople are taught that they should give higher priority to scheduling difficult to see physicians that often prescribe Zygar's pharmaceuticals. But outside of these overall guidelines, the salespeople are expected to put together their own schedules. At its root this is the purpose of this Sales Trainer. In this vein, it is important for a salesperson to not get too caught up in all of the details of a daily schedule when trying to decide what locations to visit on what days at a weekly level. Thus these training exercises are set up so that the salesperson will first schedule each day of the week with some particular location. This gives rise to the Week Exercises. After these locations have been assigned the salesperson can get more involved in actually setting up times for particular interactions. This process is also hierarchical in nature.

The Program. The program has been developed in Visual Basic to run in the Windows environment common to many computers. Developing in this framework allows the program to work largely in the point and click user environment that is so prevalent today.

There is an underlying database that contains all of the physician information. One of the most important tables in the database contains a record for each physician with information about the physician. Each attribute of the physician is called a field. While a database contains many tables, each table contains records and fields. The records correspond to rows and the fields correspond to columns in the table. While these are not the exact names for the fields in the Physicians table, the following should help you understand their basic content.

Field
Name
Physician Type of Practice
Physician Type Abbreviation
Overall Accessibility and Sales Potential Rating
Best Location for Visit
Best Visit Type
Best Days
Best Times
Prescription Patterns
Date of Last Visit

While there is other information in other tables, this table is the most important for working the scheduling exercises. This information is used to help the salesperson/ detailer develop their sales call schedule.

This information can be used in a variety of ways. Queries are the one of the most typical ways for a detailer to interact with a database. Queries allow the detailer to cull and organize the information in the database to determine things such as physician availability on a particular day or how many physicians at a location haven't been seen in the last month.

The Week Exercises. Now we return to our overall solution approach of hierarchical planning. The week exercises are dependent on the detailer having at least some information screens to help them make their decisions. The following diagram represents the screens/forms that are available to the detailer.

Because each screen or form can easily become overloaded with information certain abbreviations are used. Because of this, the detailer needs some reference screens, Sales Potential and Physician Codes, to help him/her learn the meanings of these abbreviations. There is also a necessity to have very detailed information in the form of the Appointment Notes.

Finally, the detailer needs to be able to search the database about the physicians and generate computer summaries of this information in order to determine overall physician availability for each location on each day. This is done with Queries.

Finally, the detailer needs to be able to compare their assignment decisions to those that are considered optimal and read discussions of the why these assignments are considered optimal.

The Day Exercises. After the locations to visit on each day have been determined it is necessary for the detailer to schedule the actual appointments for each day. This is done within the Day Scheduling Exercises portion of the computer program. The screens involved

in this portion of the program are very similar to those that are contained in the week portion. The actual scheduling is considerably more complicated due to the necessity of filling individual time slots based on past computer database recorded experience with the physicians.

The discussion and comparison to the optimal schedules must also be more involved. The developers of this program have worked in conjunction with senior sales management to develop situations that reflect a variety of issues that the senior sales management would like to emphasize.

Hopefully, the screens/forms make these programs user friendly. They have been designed with the intention of mimicking Zygar's actual scheduling software.

Part of this Windows based approach uses command buttons for navigation between forms and the actual scheduling uses a sort of copy and paste approach.
Week Walkthrough Exercise

Assigning Locations. After choosing the Week Planner Exercises command button to enter the week program your salespeople will see a screen like the following.

Remember that the purpose of the Week Scheduler is to determine which location your detailers will visit each day of the week. There are seven locations and they want to assign exactly one for each day of the week, Monday through Friday. Two of the locations aren't assigned.

Below is a brief description of the meaning of each of the command buttons at the bottom of the form.

Counts of Days for Each Location / Use this if you want a count of the number of physicians that can meet on each day for a given location.
Counts of Location for Each Day / Use this if you want a count of the number of physicians at each location that can meet on a given day.
Sales Potential and Accessibility / This gives a summary of the meaning of the abbreviations used to denote sales potential and accessibility.
Appointment Notes / This is a grid containing detailed information about the physicians at a particular location. It is wider than the screen so you must use the horizontal scroll bar to see all of it.
Evaluate Schedule / This will show you the optimal assignments and allow you to move to another form that gives you a discussion about the optimal location assignments. You want to complete your assignments before moving to this form so you can compare.
Clear and Exit Week Schedule / Use this to exit the week program. When you press this button you will lose all of the assignments syou have already made.

Okay Mr. Machin, now you try it on your own. Read the following text and simultaneously work through the week program. You are going to determine the location that should be visited on Tuesday. The first thing you should do is obtain counts for Tuesday.

Click on Counts of Locations for Each Day to get counts for the day.

Type T to let the program know you are interested in counts for Tuesday.

Now you should see a screen that looks like the following.