Speed became the differentiator.
Biopharma is under relentless pressure to accelerate asset development: crowded oncology pipelines chasing the same targets, compressed asset life cycles, rising costs. That pressure flows straight to the CROs who run development on their behalf, where speed has quietly become the differentiator that wins and keeps sponsors.
Losing the edge in oncology.
Between mid-2024 and early 2025, a midsize CRO with a large oncology portfolio was falling behind. A biotech sponsor advancing an immunotherapy needed site activation six weeks faster than the CRO’s historical benchmark. Site selection still ran on spreadsheets, bulk emails and manual CDA tracking, and the team had to qualify more than 80 sites across seven countries. Each site selection burned 288 hours of labour, over 60% of it spent chasing forms, with between 783 and 2,175 touchpoints in a single feasibility phase.
“We were sending hundreds of emails just to collect feasibility forms. The client expected rapid startup, and we knew we couldn’t deliver it with our current system.”
Project Director · Clinical OperationsRFP to FPI, redesigned.
Before touching the platform, Yendou mapped the entire RFP-to-FPI journey with the CRO’s BD and ClinOps teams, adapting to their workflow rather than forcing a tool on them. Rollout came in three phases: site-list import with auto-executed CDA workflows, pre-screened via GlobalData; automated feasibility outreach to 80+ sites tracked on real-time dashboards; and central knowledge capture into a Site Intelligence Directory, so every site record could be reused across studies.
Nine weeks that won the next bid.
Feasibility duration fell 79%, labour hours 93%, and costs by $37K, accelerating site selection by nine weeks. That speed let the CRO respond to RFPs with hard benchmarks, and it won a follow-on oncology study two months later. The nine-week gain became a key differentiator in every proposal that followed.
Without adding a single hire, the team moved from paperwork to strategic delivery, and expanded feasibility outreach into three new countries on one compliance platform.