In our sites - PSS differentiated approach fuels global expansion
by Beth DiPaolo, President and Global Head of Professional Scientific Services
The Biopharmaceutical industry continues to seek out strategic partners to help drive pipelines and medicines to market. With cost containment and hiring restrictions, clients seek out partners who can provide insourcing solutions for work clients want done in-house. With the unemployment in the developed countries continuing to decline-United States: 3.9%, Europe: 7.14% average, and APAC: 4.50% average clients are finding the traditional staff augmentation of utilizing temporaries to be even more challenging. The ability to attract, train, and retain are the main issues when using temps.
PSS has been offering a solution to those challenges for more than 15 years of providing technical services that PSS manages at the client’s site. Clients may define this type of service differently internally; it may be a business partner outsourcing (BPO), in-house or managed services, or SOW work. PSS is where a scope of work is defined similar to outsourcing, and PSS recruits, trains, and manages services in client environments driven by agreed upon KPI’s and governance.
We currently have approximately 1,800 employees with over 70 teams globally. PSS is currently offered in 16 countries through North America, Europe and Asia Pacific.
Since our beginning, at our foundation is the vision and philosophy of finding great people, taking great care of them, so they in turn will take great care of our clients. The combination of our technical and regulatory expertise combined with HR Best Practices has helped fuel our success with this model. PSS is the only insourcing solution in the Biopharmaceutical industry that has been recognized 11 times in the last 10 years by our clients.
We decided to take PSS to the next level. PSS has evolved over the years in continuing to innovate to ensure clients are delighted with quality, service, productivity and efficiency. To help fuel this, we have invested heavily in technical, regulatory, behavioral, and leadership training. Courses are offered monthly to all PSS employees with facilitators through live web meetings. Clients have come to value and trust that PSS employees are proactively developed and cross-trained by Eurofins to help provide flexibility with the service model. This has helped us with not only development, but also retention as it meets the needs of millennials as well.
PSS has always had a culture of doing it faster, better, cheaper. We encourage teams to find ways to save time and money. We pass on the savings to our clients and recognize our employees for their innovation. We decided to take that spirit one step further with formalizing a LEAN initiative globally for PSS. All employees are set up to receive core LEAN training, and with a LEAN manager on our staff, we have formalized LEAN champions and projects to continue to improve our services to benefit our clients. We have proven success in setting up, validating, and LEANing labs in client environments.
This has translated into growth for PSS globally. Large global strategic clients have taken advantage of deploying PSS in several countries knowing they can rely on international uniformity with PSS no matter where their needs exist with assurance of local regulatory compliance as well. Each country has very specific laws around compliance with a managed service offering, and we have the expertise to ensure compliance no matter where we offer services to mitigate any risk for our clients. As a result clients have taken advantage of relying on PSS technical expertise to the point of asking us to flex our resources between their sites globally to help with fluctuation and demand with their research and development needs.
No matter what specific scientific needs or location, we have been able to exceed our clients’ expectations globally. If you’re interested in learning more about how we can serve you, please reach out to me directly (BethDiPaolo@urofinsUS.com). I’ll be happy to see how we can help.