Designing, building and managing a pharmaceutical company’s product pipeline chart can require a surprising amount of time and effort – designing styles for the chart, entering html code and text for products, stages, and indications, then mapping products or indications into stages, and, finally, linking to individual product detail pages.
Sometimes, a product pipeline is built in Flash or is simply a static image file (neither option is great for SEO). Even bigger problems arise when you have to make edits to the chart. For example, adding a new stage/phase or changing the status of the product within a stage/phase can require building an entirely new chart.
Workbox Pipeline Plugin for WordPress
As you probably guessed by now, Workbox’s programmers have developed a WordPress plugin to automate pharmaceutical product pipeline management. Here’s what it handles:
> Pipeline content and links to internal product detail pages. You can manage pipeline content very easily through your WordPress admin panel, and link to specific site pages through a simple dropdown menu.
> Clinical and/or regulatory phases and stages. Not only can you create as many “phases” or “stages” as are appropriate for your company, but you can also manage the percentage of completion of each stage for each product (1% through 100%).
> Indications and references. A product can have multiple indications, the indications can link to individual detail pages and each indication can have a separate “phase/stage” timeline. Additionally, each product can have one or more clinical or other reference that can link to more content internally, offsite or open a layer/iframe.
> Full and condensed pipelines. You may want a smaller pipeline on your homepage that features select products or indications, while showing a more complete pipeline on your top products page. Our plugin allows you to select which products and indications appear in the mini-pipeline dynamically.
> SEO. Because it’s fast (it presents neither an image file nor Flash), contains relevant keywords and unique text, and links to internal pages, the plugin can improve your site’s SEO.
> Show on any page. Show one or more pipelines on any page by using the Options feature in your WordPress admin panel.
> Multiple pipelines. Create as many pipelines as you like. An example would be if you want to separate the presentation of entire classes or types of products, like pharmaceutical and diagnostic products. Here’s how one of our clients, Ampio Pharmaceutials, uses it:
Finally, here’s how the pipeline is served on the frontend. As you can see, this is not rocket science – feel free to use the concept for your own WP implementation. We’d love to see your results if you do!
Cheers, Gleb Aksutchenko
$html .= ‘
<div>
<h3>Product Pipeline</h3>
<div>
<b class=”top”></b><b></b>
<table cellspacing=”0″>
<tbody><tr>
<th class=”title”>PROGRAM</th>
<th>INDICATION</th>
‘;
foreach($pph as $item){
$html .= ‘<th>’.$item->title.’</th>’;
}
$html .= ‘</tr>’;
$currentP = 1;
foreach($products as $product){
$html2 = ”;
$nb = ”;
$rowspan = 1;
if($gTotal[$product->title] > 1 && $currentP < $gTotal[$product->title]){
$nb = ‘nb’;
$currentP ++;
$rowspan = $gTotal[$product->title];
} else {
if($currentP > 1)
$rowspan = 0;
$currentP = 1;
}
foreach($pph as $key=>$val){
if($val->title == $product->pph)
$eNum = $key + 1;
$key ++;
$html2 .= ‘<td><span>*</span> </td>’;
}
$html .= ‘
<tr>’;
if($rowspan) $html .= ‘<td class=”title” rowspan=”‘.$rowspan.’”><a href=”‘.$site_url.’/’.$product->title_code.’/”>’.$product->title.’</a></td>’;
$html .= ‘<td>’.$product->indication.’</td>’;
$html .= $html2;
$html .= ‘
</tr>
‘;
}
$html .= ‘
</tbody></table>
</div>
</div>’;