Contract Research Organizations (CROs) are companies that offer research-based services to the pharmaceutical, biotechnology and medical device companies on a contract basis. These include biopharmaceutical development, biologic assay development, clinical and preclinical research, clinical trials, pharmacovigilance, commercialization and post-marketing surveillance. CROs usually support foundations, research institutions, universities, governmental organizations.
There are multiple reasons why companies and organizations outsource clinical trials and research. These include the required expertise and infrastructure that provides the benefit of cost, time, and efficiency, which make them the three major Contract Research Organizations’ challenges that directly affect their reputation. To deliver these benefits to their sponsors, they need a smart time & project management solution that’d keep these factors in check.
At actiTIME, we have a dozen CRO clients who share their case studies with us. In this article, we’d like to use their feedback and illustrate in more detail how Contract Research Organizations can benefit from actiTIME.
How to Use actiTIME for Contract Research Organizations
1. Meet the Deadlines
Usually, sponsors want their drugs to reach the market as soon as possible due to high competition and patient needs. That means that Contract Research Organizations have to work under tight deadlines and deliver their services on time. actiTIME is tailored to meet these standards; let us show you.
Task Estimates, Deadlines & Notifications
First of all, managers can assign task estimates to compare your performance against the estimated and better plan your workload in the future. To do that, they need to define the estimates beforehand, wait until their team is finished with the tasks and build Estimated vs. Actual Time Report in a few clicks.
Estimated vs. Actual Time report in actiTIME displaying the variance
between the estimated time and the actual time expenses
The difference between the estimated time and the spent time is called Variance. It can be calculated in regard to particular customers, projects or tasks.
You can also set up email notifications according to the following rules:
- Remind users to track their time if the reported time is less than estimated;
- Notify users of the upcoming task deadline;
- Notify users of their task progress as compared to the estimated time specified in percentage terms.
If necessary, you can set deadlines for the tasks and set up email alerts on upcoming deadlines or worked out task estimates. Plus, you can use Zapier to integrate actiTIME with any email system of choice and send out automatic notifications to all employees whenever tasks, projects or customers are created / updated in actiTIME.
For more information on how to sync your actiTIME with Gmail, Outlook or any other email platform available on Zapier, feel free to read this post.
Task Statuses & Kanban Board
To see the status of the current tasks, managers can create any number of custom workflow statuses and define their order.
For better progress visualization, you can switch your task list view interface to a Kanban board.
Kanban board in actiTIME displaying custom workflow statuses
and actual time vs. estimated time
There you’ll have status columns according to the number and the order of your task statuses. Drag and drop tasks between the columns to change their workflow status.
2. Handle Projects, Teams & Sponsors
User Departments
Contract Research Organizations usually have several teams with various ranges of abilities and experience, from medically trained staff to medical writers. To coordinate their work, switch between the project stages back and forth using workflow statuses and user departments.
With User Departments, managers can break down users into groups according to their departments, teams or any other groups of your choice.
Custom Work Structure
Create a custom work scope to meet the needs of your Contract Research Organization. By default, actiTIME offers a three-level structure: Customer / Project / Task. You may want to change the level names with those that better align with your workflow.
3. Take Employees’ Time Tracking Data Under Control
For higher performance accountability and better cost management, it’s vital for CRO employees to track time as honestly and accurately as possible. Fortunately, actiTIME has several valuable features that help to do just that, and here are the main of them:
- actiTIME Chrome extension – Using this one-click timer, your team members can log every minute of their working time automatically and right from the browser, without getting distracted from essential tasks.
- Timesheet approval – After completing their timesheets, employees can submit them for your review and approval. And in case you find a mistake in a colleague’s time entries, you can reject their time-track and give an explanation for why you did that via comments.
- Timesheet locking – If you don’t want employees to make changes in any past time entries, you have an option to lock the completed timesheets and prevent any uncontrollable time-track manipulations this way.
In addition to the above measures, you can create a log of users’ timesheet changes by integrating actiTIME with Google Sheets (or any other similar app) via Zapier.
While setting up this integration, you may select what kind of changes you wish to track (e.g., task updates, timesheet updates, etc.) and then record them all automatically in a document of choice. So, whenever an odd data change or anomaly takes place, you can open this doc and search for some extra evidence in it.
4. Stick to the Budget
In actiTIME, you can control project budgets in two ways: set up email notifications when your project cost exceeds its budget or build project cost reports that show the cost of work according to the hourly pay rates and time logs of your project team.
Budget Overrun Notifications
If you define hourly pay rates for your team members, actiTIME automatically calculates the project cost that is equal to hourly pay rates multiplied by hours logged by users participating in the project.
In the notifications settings, you can define a rule where admin users get notified when the project budget has been exceeded.
Customizable notifications in actiTIME – specify events
that you want actiTIME to notify you and others about
Project Cost Charts & Reports
In actiTIME, you can convert your time logs and hourly pay rates into configurable charts and reports. Set up a date range, choose from projects or customers, select your team members and more.
You can also build a project cost report that shows logged time and hourly pay rates by users that are automatically summed up and broken down according to your customers and projects.
Cost of Work report in actiTIME calculating cost of work of individual users
based on their hourly rates
The detailed breakdown allows you to review your costs and see if you’re within the budget. Analyze the profit/loss ratio per project, and provide your customers with detailed information on billed hours.
5. Automate Billing & Invoicing
If you set up hourly pay rates for your team members to calculate the cost of work, then actiTIME can use your data to create bills and invoices. Use our customizable ready-to-go templates, add some branding, taxes and discounts.
When you are ready, download the invoice as a PDF file and send it to your client.
6. Ensure Data Security
CROs have to deal with lots of sensitive data regarding patients, drugs, R&D activities and more. To provide maximum data security, we offer actiTIME Self-Hosted.
actiTIME Self-Hosted
While actiTIME online is installed on the secure Amazon servers, you may want full security control. With actiTIME Self-Hosted, you make a one-time purchase and install the software on your premises. It supports all the latest Windows and Windows Server versions, no special system requirements are needed.
Ready to Try actiTIME in Your Contract Research Organization?
actiTIME is timesheet software that is used by 10,000+ clients, including Contract Research Organizations.
Review actiTIME Self-Hosted pricing details, consider actiTIME Online or contact our support team. To see if actiTIME is a good fit for your Contract Research Organization, explore all actiTIME benefits using a free 30-day trial.
