Frost & Sullivan: Zinc Ahead Dominates the Medical Compliance Software Market through the Offer of a Highly Customizable Software Solution

-- Zinc Ahead's private cloud platform assures compliance, increases customers' productivity, and rapid return on investment

MOUNTAIN VIEW, California, Feb. 26, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Based on its recent analysis of the medical compliance software for life sciences market, Frost & Sullivan recognizes Zinc Ahead with the 2013 Global Frost & Sullivan Award for Customer Value Leadership.

Zinc Ahead leads the competition on the strength of its workflow-based compliance management solution, which is highly scalable and configurable to various complex regulatory codes across the globe. With this commercially effective solution, Zinc Ahead has demonstrably been able to bring significant improvements to clients' compliance processes, evidenced by the 70 percent increase in the approval of jobs performed using the system in a significant user base.

Zinc Ahead's private cloud-based medical compliance software solution has three elements: Zinc MAPS — a workflow tool that aids collaboration, approval, and review of the various stages in the promotional marketing process; Zinc DAM — a digital asset management system that stores approved materials and documents; and finally Zinc Connections — the integration network that enables interaction with external systems including third-party application programming interface (API) and digital asset management (DAM) providers.

Zinc's unified service offering is architected to be open and easy to integrate as well as fast to implement. The cloud-based collaboration platform helps life sciences companies create a fully compliant marketing material, with inputs from key stakeholders in medical, legal, regulatory, and marketing fields.

"At the heart of Zinc Ahead's solution is its workflow-based architecture, which enables the team to review and approve the campaign management process at every step so that the internal process is in line with the external regulatory benchmarks," said Frost & Sullivan Research Analyst Shruthi Parakkal. "Zinc Ahead's review interface can review not only e-detailing and written content, but also rich media including videos, websites, and mobile applications."

The solution's interface allows the users to comment simultaneously on the processes from a number of end-use systems including desktop, tablets, and mobile phones. Clients can also utilize the reference feature to hyperlink documents, claims, digital assets, audit trail, certificates, and supporting material between various projects. This ensures campaign consistency across regions and transparency within and outside the organization.

Furthermore, the solution is equipped with a dashboard that facilitates process improvement and benchmarking of best practices among peers by evaluating the number of approvals, review cycle time, efficiency of the brands, and creative agencies. Zinc MAPS, in particular, ensures complete accountability of the entire marketing process by centralizing it at a single point of control.

Another major advantage of Zinc MAPS is that it can be customized to the local, regional, and global regulatory standards including the OPDP 2253 (US), ANSM (France) and PAAB (Canada). Zinc MAPS has over 200 configuration options and sector-specific embedded workflows, which aligns the compliance process with the client's standard operating procedures. This capability of Zinc MAPS to perform multiple configurations increases productivity and reduces time to approval, so that there are fewer changes in the internal management and re-training of the users.

Zinc MAPS has an extensive user base in Life Sciences and has been able to significantly reduce the materials cost of paper-based review by up to 75 percent and the time spent on approval by up to 57 percent, leading to proven faster time to market. Its high degree of scalability and configurability has enabled Zinc Ahead to expand its user base at a very fast rate, and with an initial software deployment time of just six weeks in many cases, Zinc Ahead delivers one of the fastest implementation capabilities in the market. As it is a private hosted cloud, the scale-up period is rapid, and clients report rapid return on investment, ranging from six months to one year.

"Zinc Ahead's particular and sustained commitment to providing its customers with best-in-class services has resulted in revenue growth of approximately 40 percent in the past four years, and the company demonstrates considerable potential to grow further, even in a complex market," noted Parakkal.

Each year, Frost & Sullivan presents this award to the company that has demonstrated excellence in implementing strategies that proactively create value for its customers with a focus on improving the return on investment that customers make in its services or products. The award recognizes the company's inordinate focus on enhancing the value that its customers receive beyond simply good customer service, which leads to improved customer retention and ultimately customer base expansion.

Frost & Sullivan Best Practices Awards recognize companies in a variety of regional and global markets for demonstrating outstanding achievement and superior performance in areas such as leadership, technological innovation, customer service, and strategic product development. Industry analysts compare market participants and measure performance through in-depth interviews, analysis, and extensive secondary research in order to identify best practices in the industry.

About Zinc Ahead

Committed to innovation and product excellence, Zinc Ahead is the world's leading provider of software compliance solutions designed specifically for the life sciences industry.

Zinc's private cloud-based collaboration software, has already transformed compliance processes in more than 100 life sciences companies in 160 countries worldwide, demonstrating rapid efficiency and cost savings. 

Zinc Ahead is a privately-held company with headquarters in the UK and offices across the United States and Asia. The company is dedicated to serving the Life Sciences community by providing excellent customer service and knowledgeable business support to the 40,000 daily Zinc users in over 170 countries worldwide.

For more information please visit www.zinc-ahead.com

About Frost & Sullivan

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Contact:

Mireya Espinoza
P: +1.210. 247.3870
F: +1.210.348.1003
E: mireya.espinoza@frost.com

Rhian Pearse
P: +44 (0)1865 398 170
E: RhianPearse@zinc-ahead.com