If your finance team uses a tool like Anaplan or Workday Adaptive Planning, it’s easy to ask: Why bring in another tool when I already have a forecast that runs through my planning platform?
It’s a fair question, and one we hear a lot, particularly from finance leaders who are new to the biopharma space.
The short answer: Auxilius and industry-agnostic planning tools aren’t solving the same problem. They are two separate tools that have two very different jobs:
Said another way, planning tools first ask, “What do you want to plan?” While Auxilius comes out of the box knowing that the answer is “a clinical trial.”
The Challenges of Building and Managing a Clinical Trial Forecast
There are three challenges that make it difficult to use a planning tool to forecast your clinical trial spend:
Challenge 1: Effective trial-level forecasting requires more detail than planning tools typically support: A planning tool can hold a forecast at the study level, but doesn’t hold the underlying detail required to explain variance. Study budgets vary widely with trial design, and the variance that matters sits in the drivers of that forecast, such as enrollment rate, site activation, and enrollment mix. Without that detail built into your forecast, you can see that you missed forecast but won’t be able to explain why.
Challenge 2: Many clinical trial costs are non-linear in nature: Many substantial clinical trial costs are non-linear and instead follow the trajectory of the clinical trial’s progress, enrollment, and site activation; this requires detailed modeling and updates specific to the nuance of clinical trial management.
Challenge 3: Clinical trial costs are highly variable and subject to change: Not only are clinical trial costs non-linear, but they are incredibly variable once the trial kicks off. Enrollment can accelerate or stall more than expected, sites can activate late, protocols get amended, and change orders land throughout the life of the trial. Effectively modeling these what-if scenarios requires that you modify the underlying clinical forecast drivers and logic that isn’t in planning tools.
In theory, you could configure a planning tool to account for these nuances, but it wouldn’t support them natively and would require a considerable amount of configuration. Managing your clinical trial forecasts at a study level in a planning tool would require:
That isn’t just a complicated build, it’s also a huge ongoing effort to update a tool that was never designed to manage clinical trial costs at this level of detail in the first place.
Enter Auxilius: Purpose-Built for Clinical Trial Forecasting
Planning tools are great for high-level portfolio and enterprise planning, but to work most effectively they still need reliable inputs for the main cost categories driving the forecast.
That’s where Auxilius fits. Auxilius builds a detailed sub-ledger for your clinical trial costs using trial activity and contracted costs alongside CRO and other vendor forecasts to continuously estimate remaining study costs and total expected cost through end of trial. The result: an accurate forecast built around your trial's specific design, with no custom build required.
Key differences include:
The trial activity data needed to calculate your hardest-to-track clinical costs sits in systems and documents (e.g. EDC, CTAs, Payments reports) that your planning tool can’t reach. Auxilius ingests the documents and data that describe and model your trials, wherever they live, including: site contracts, protocols and amendments, EDC feeds, CRO contracts, payments reports, and invoices from your ERP.
Auxilius was built specifically to manage the underlying financial forecast for each individual clinical trial with the ability to report at the portfolio level. For sponsors with large portfolios and thus many individual forecasts to configure, Auxilius can draft their forecast drivers using AI that humans can then sign off on.
Auxilius automatically forecasts investigator spend with detail down to the patient level using contracted site costs, the trial’s schedule of assessments, and live trial activity data.
While enterprise-grade planning tools have robust scenario modeling capabilities, the Auxilius scenario builder is made specifically to model the impact of trial changes on your forecast in ways that other tools cannot.
The Auxilius forecast automatically recalibrates each month when actuals are booked, and again whenever a change order is finalized, so there is no manual rebuild of the model. Because budgets, forecasts, and actuals are maintained at the line-item level, actuals replace forecasted amounts at that same level of detail.
A team could attempt to build similar functionality in their corporate planning tool, but doing so would require significant custom forecast configuration, net-new integrations, new data mapping, new business rules, and ongoing maintenance. Auxilius provides those clinical trial-specific requirements in a purpose-built platform.
For biotech FP&A teams, this delivers three core advantages:
Better together
Instead of choosing between the two, many biopharma finance teams manage their clinical R&D forecast in Auxilius, then export to their planning software. That gives them the flexibility and power of an industry-leading corporate planning tool for the corporate picture, and the detail and accuracy of Auxilius for the clinical R&D spend that drives much of their corporate budget.
If you’re interested in learning more about Auxilius, book a demo to speak with our team.
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