Improving long-term sales forecasts in the drug industry: a renovation of the lifecycle project

In pharmaceutical companies, accurate drug sales forecasting is crucial as it allows better budgeting and resource allocation, ensuring that financial resources are used efficiently, with the ultimate goal of being able to reach more patients. At the company Novartis, a Data Science Sales Forecast p...

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Bibliographic Details
Author: Muñoz Checa, Daniel
Format: master thesis
Publication Date:2025
Country:España
Institution:Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC)
Repository:UPCommons. Portal del coneixement obert de la UPC
Language:English
OAI Identifier:oai:upcommons.upc.edu:2117/449243
Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/2117/449243
Access Level:Embargoed access
Keyword:Women pharmacists
Product life cycle
Time-series analysis
Machine learning
Sèries temporals
Predicció de vendes
Anàlisi de supervivència
Algoritmes d'IA
Anàlisi del rendiment dels models
Time series
Sales forecasting
Survival analysis
AI algorithms
Models performance analysis
Farmacèutiques
Cicle de vida del producte
Sèries temporals--Anàlisi
Aprenentatge automàtic
Àrees temàtiques de la UPC::Informàtica::Intel·ligència artificial::Aprenentatge automàtic
Description
Summary:In pharmaceutical companies, accurate drug sales forecasting is crucial as it allows better budgeting and resource allocation, ensuring that financial resources are used efficiently, with the ultimate goal of being able to reach more patients. At the company Novartis, a Data Science Sales Forecast project which started in 2019 has been constantly evolving, in order to achieve more accurate, stable and explainable sales predictions. This master thesis conducts a complete renovation of the 'Lifecycle' component of the project, which focuses on the prediction of the stage change from the Growth to the Maturity phase of the drug sales curve, ensuring a consistent and high quality forecast for long-term predictions. It proposes and implements a new core modeling approach, enhances the training dataset creation and introduces a new algorithm to refine predictions for the high investment drugs of Novartis. Extensive analysis are conducted in order to justify the changes applied, demonstrating significant improvements in the stability and the consistency of the predictions, being a key factor in the adoption and trustiness of the project for the financial planners.