CORE FOR SERVICE PROVIDERS
CORE: Streamline Proposal Budgeting
A comprehensive solution to optimize clinical trial proposal pricing for CROs

MARKET PROBLEM
Have you ever been in front of a Sponsor unable to explain your budget, or challenged that the budget does not make sense?
Clinical providers rely on outdated, error-prone tools for complex costing such as Excel-based systems which are prone to errors, difficult to manage, and lack security. This leads to budget discrepancies, inefficiencies, and costly mistakes during proposal creation and client interactions. The lack of technology-enabled solutions to address challenges in the infrastructure side of clinical trials, such as proposal and budget management, is staggering.

Vulnerable Budgeting Tools
Excel-based systems are prone to formula errors, systemic crashes and intellectual property and data loss. CRO proposal leaders worry about the costing tool freezing/crashing due to size or complexity, producing erroneous results that take tremendous manpower to resolve, causing extended review times, frustration, and Sponsor complaints.
Major proposal loss contributors
Custom-built tools across providers cause Sponsor alignment issues, extended review times, and mapping challenges. This situation is further exacerbated by the M&A activity in the clinical research space, which require merging costing tools in parallel with maintaining legacy, leading to user frustration and significant bridging effort. After all, proposal budgeting is the “heart and soul” of a CRO and in a competitive environment, who can afford to lose a bid due to a mistake in the budget? Added to these challenges are high turnover rate among proposal staff, difficulty in replacing staff and raising salaries, all contributing to the need to the fundamentally transform clinical costing.
Lack of Advanced Analytics
Current systems offer poor analytics, making it difficult to extract insights and improve budget accuracy, or even enforce complicated Sponsor agreements. Basic utility functions such as role-based access, approval workflow, audit trail or advanced reporting are missing, thus introducing errors and blind spots.
OVERVIEW
Empower your team with efficient, accurate, and scalable budgeting.
CORE, the only SaaS solution built by clinical trial costing experts, enhances proposal win rates through precise, reliable budgets and reduces bid generation costs by optimizing internal resources. CORE streamlines budget creation, boosting Sponsor confidence and allowing CROs to focus on competitive strategies. Strategikon team engaged with leading CRO proposal stakeholders through both interviews and industry surveys. Most responders said that current costing tools “need improvement”, and they were concerned with the reliability of the budget output and afraid of formula breaks and unwanted changes. On top of the wish list for the future state, 80% of responders thought that further standardization of activity bid grids would benefit the industry and 60% wished for a “digital, web-based costing tool” that would enable better analytics and reporting, greater reliability, and security.

Accelerated Budget Development and Review
Speed up bid generation and review with automated pricing engine that combines your resources, costing algorithms and client rate cards.

Simplified Budget Creation
Effortlessly build and manage complex budgets with customizable rate cards and algorithms.

Enhanced Rate Card Management
Gain full control over rate cards and algorithms, ensuring accuracy and consistency.

Advanced Business Intelligence
Leverage historical data for insightful analytics, helping optimize future business strategies.

Scenario Simulation and Analysis
Perform in-depth impact analyses by simulating multiple costing scenarios in real-time.

Eliminate Errors and Downtime
CORE minimizes costly errors and breakdowns, enabling smoother operations and faster approval cycles.
BENEFITS
Win More Clinical Trial Bids with CORE’s Scalable Costing Solution
Streamline your clinical trial budgeting process with CORE, the leading SaaS solution designed to accelerate proposal budget generation, improve accuracy, and reduce operational costs, helping you secure more business efficiently.

Generate Budgets 100X Faster
CORE accelerates budget creation with automated workflows and intuitive interfaces, enabling your team to generate complex operational plans and budgets faster, significantly improving response times for RFPs. For example, creating a ballpark budget based on your customers protocol usually takes less than 1 hour, compared to days, using legacy methods.
Increase Proposal Team Capacity Without Hiring
Expand your team’s ability to handle higher volumes of cost proposals with CORE’s scalable platform, allowing for multi-fold-fold increase in capacity without additional headcount or resources. Add to capacity the time saved through the elimination of the ubiquitous tool maintenance effort, and your team can scale sustainably while increasing both productivity and efficiency.


Reduce Costing Errors by >95%
According to MarketWatch, 88% of Excel spreadsheets contain at least one error…In contract, CORE is a costing platform that is nearly error free, secure and not vulnerable to intruder break ins. With robust algorithms configuration infrastructure, CORE reduces costly errors due to broken links and manual mistakes ensuring greater accuracy and fewer revisions.
Achieve >50% Savings in Proposal Development Costs
By optimizing resource allocation, eliminating tool breakdowns, and automating time-consuming tasks, CORE contributed to lowering business operations costs by up to 50% vs. status quo, boosting profitability and efficiency.

WHY CHOOSE US
Only SaaS solution designed for proposal budget development by CRO pricing experts.
Equipped with all the bells and whistles of a true technology-enabled costing tool, CORE takes the stress out of creating proposal budgets through an end-to-end technology solution that allows CRO proposal teams to simultaneously develop both operational plan and budgets and evaluate decision impact on timelines, resource allocation, discounts and gross margins.
Unlike Excel and home-grown, hard to maintain tools, CORE supports algorithm, resource and rate card configurations at the push of a button, a true game changer in the industry.
Increase Proposal Win Rate
Achieve higher accuracy and reliability in your proposal budgets.
Lower Bid Generation Costs
Optimize internal resources for more efficient bid creation processes.
Improve Resource Utilization
Maximize efficiency with smarter allocation of internal service provider

It takes more than 250 hours to generate an average Phase 3 study budget and top CROs are spending in excess of 20,000 hours per year entrenched in budget development. What if your organization could pocket >90% of that invaluable time bank?
RESOURCES
Explore Expert Insights and Resources for Clinical Excellence

Webinars
Technology for Fast, Accurate Planning and Budgeting
Leading biopharmaceutical sponsors trust PORTFOLIO for pipeline planning and budgeting with superior results and reported more than 10x Return on Investment.

Blogs
Driving Customer Success Through Governance: Transforming Pharma Vendor Management with AI Innovation
Effective vendor governance is essential to ensure operational success, cost efficiency, and regulatory compliance.

Case Studies
Streamlining Vendor Management: How a Leading Biopharma Company Found Success
DEMO
Request a demo
Discover how Strategikon’s advanced solutions can streamline your clinical trial operations. Request a personalized demo to explore how our tools transform budgeting, vendor management, and outsourcing efficiency for pharma and biotech.