Gilead Sciences Gains Real-Time Visibility into Clinical Trial Forecasting with SAP Analytics Cloud

Overview

As a global biopharmaceutical leader managing multi‑year clinical trial programs, Gilead required a forecasting platform capable of governing billions of dollars in R&D investment across its clinical pipeline. Facing increasing complexity, the company needed to plan both current and placeholder studies while maintaining transparency into patient enrollment drivers, cost assumptions, and global trial performance.

However, traditional processes made it difficult for leadership to confidently forecast trial costs and allocate resources.
To address these challenges, Gilead partnered with Macrospect to implement SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC) and modernize its approach to clinical trial forecasting and analysis.

Business Challenge

Clinical trials are among the most complex and expensive activities in the pharmaceutical industry. Managing global studies requires coordinating financial planning with clinical operations, enrollment projections, and detailed cost assumptions.

Gilead needed a planning platform capable of supporting this complexity while improving forecasting confidence.

Key challenges included:

• Limited transparency into patient enrollment drivers and cost assumptions
• Difficulty modeling planning scenarios against approved budgets
• Complex global patient cost waterfalls across multiple studies
• Manual processes for calculating monthly accruals
• Fragmented data across trial actuals, budgets, scenarios, and purchase order systems

Solution

Macrospect guided Gilead through the implementation of SAP Analytics Cloud for clinical trial forecasting and analysis.

Leveraging deep Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) expertise, the Macrospect team helped simplify and streamline Gilead’s existing planning model while modernizing forecasting capabilities. The solution integrated key cost drivers and aligned financial and clinical stakeholders around a single planning platform.The new environment enables Gilead to:

• Forecast clinical trial costs more accurately
• Model planning scenarios against approved budgets
• Analyze enrollment drivers and subject visit schedules
• Simplify global patient cost waterfalls across studies
• Automate monthly accrual calculations for faster and more compliant reporting

Business Outcomes

With SAP Analytics Cloud in place, Gilead now delivers more accurate forecasts with real‑time visibility into clinical trial performance. Financial and operational data from trial actuals, budgets, scenarios, and purchase orders are unified in dashboards, providing leadership with greater transparency and confidence in planning decisions.

The new environment also brings greater clarity to the operational drivers behind trial costs while reducing manual processes and improving consistency across studies.

Key outcomes include:

• Embedded enrollment drivers and standardized subject visit schedules make assumptions visible and auditable
• Simplified global patient cost waterfalls improve consistency across studies.
• Automated monthly accrual calculations reduce manual effort and the risk of errors
• Scenario‑based planning to compare potential study outcomes against approved budgets before committing additional investment
• Unified dashboards integrating trial actuals, budgets, scenarios, and purchase order data
• The new platform also provides a scalable foundation for managing future pipeline growth as
• Gilead continues expanding its clinical research programs.