Why Resource Visibility is Essential for Clinical Research Organizations

Smart management of your employees' time is a critical component of success for clinical research organizations. Even minor delays, such as missing an on-site visit, can disrupt trial timelines, increase costs, and delay access to new treatments for patients.

Real-time resource visibility – the ability to see live information on all your staff, skills, and availability in one place – can be the key piece of the resourcing puzzle that helps you maximize staff utilization, and minimize the risk of projects getting delayed or derailed.

If your CRO wants to double down on efficiency and consistent delivery of high-quality projects, improving resource visibility will ensure your team’s knowledge, talent, and skills are put to the best possible use – so you can stay competitive, agile, and in control.

Let’s look a little deeper:

Reason 1: You can maximize your team's specialist expertise

You employ highly skilled experts to meet the exacting operational and regulatory demands of running trials and other specialist work. Your ability to deliver work accurately and efficiently relies on matching those experts to clinical trials that require their expertise, and ensuring they’re available exactly when the schedule demands it.

Real-time visibility gives you a detailed overview of both your team’s expertise and their current allocations, so you can match them with trials that best suit their skills and availability.

This doesn’t just ensure trials are delivered by suitably qualified experts, safeguarding quality and compliance issues. It also means they’re delivered on schedule, with fewer delays and better resource utilization. 

Reason 2: It gives you runway to control project risks

Clinical trial timelines are carefully planned, but unexpected challenges—like patient recruitment issues or regulatory changes—can cause delays. Failing to manage these risks effectively can impact a CRO’s reputation

One of the key risk factors is resource risk – which arises from not having the people or skills to meet project demands. This can cause project delays, quality and compliance issues, and more. 

Improving your resource visibility lets you anticipate and mitigate resource risk. It lets you see your capacity and availability – and track that against workload – so you can identify potential bottlenecks and capacity crunches in advance.

Equipped with this knowledge, you can take action to reduce the risk, such as recruiting more resources or reallocating them from other clinical trials, to protect your schedule and reputation. 

Reason 3: Collaboration across different departments and sites becomes simpler

As well as the cost, speed, and expertise offered, many clients expect CROs to offer a truly global reach – and that means the ability to schedule colleagues in other locations. As if your CRO needed more complexity…

Fortunately, enhancing resource visibility can make cross-border coordination much easier. By housing resource information in a single centralized system, operations teams can identify the right people with the right skills, wherever in the world they’re based.

With the right tools, you can build schedules that accommodate different timezones and national holidays, see costs in different currencies to balance your budget, and identify different language skills in your project team.  

Reason 4: You're equipped to make faster, more accurate staffing decisions

Resource accuracy is about getting the right people into the right projects at the right time. Accurate resource allocations are key to quality goals, schedule adherence, budget control, and – in the case of CROs – regulatory compliance.

Improving resource visibility makes it infinitely easier to achieve resourcing accuracy. With a comprehensive, centralised resource database you can instantly access the following information about your team members. 

• Name and role
• Team and location
• Skills and competency levels
• Capacity 
• Availability
• Assignments
• Interests 
• Billable rate  

With this information at your fingertips, it's much quicker and easier to find the perfect person – like a mid-level data analyst in Melbourne who’s available in May, or a trial coordinator with Spanish skills who can start in September. 

You’ll have everything you need for informed decisions, confident in the knowledge that you’re building the best team to deliver on time, budget, and to the highest of standards.

Reason 5: It gives you tools to understand and plan capacity in the long-term

Of course, your CRO’s success doesn’t just rely on having the right resources available for clinical trials right now. It’s also about having the right supply of staff to meet future demand too. This is known as strategic capacity planning.

Resource visibility ladders up to provide operations teams with a clear picture of organization capacity now and in the future. With this insight, leaders can assess how well their workforce aligns with their longer-term strategic objectives, such as scaling operations, expanding into different sectors, or taking on additional clinical trials. 

Resource data highlights trends such as:

• Over- or under-use of particular roles and skills
• Gaps in critical areas
• Potential for staff burnout

This supports data driven decision making – improving resource planning, capacity planning, as well as recruitment, training, and redeployment strategies – to drive success and growth.

Reason 6: You get insight into how to minimize resource costs

While CRO staff are your greatest asset, they’re also a significant expense, so it’s important to avoid overstaffing.

Overstaffing means having more resources than you need to match the workload demand of your projects, resulting in unnecessarily high project costs that eat into your profitability. 

On the flip side, if you don’t allocate enough staff, you could end up with extra costs anyway, as you may need to make last minute hires or bringing in contractors to fill gaps. It’s a balancing act – one that’s hard to get right without strong resource visibility.

Resource visibility lets you rightsize your study teams from the start, as it helps you get a comprehensive understanding of your organization's capacity and the demand that is forecasted.

Learn more: How to Forecast Resource Demand ➡️

Reason 7: Everyday, quality-of-life benefits = happier employees

In highly specialist fields, it’s hard to recruit people with the technical expertise your CRO needs. And once you have them, you’ll want to keep them.

But that’s not always easy.

Imbalanced workloads can damage morale and cause resentment among teams, and being stuck on assignments with no scope for professional growth can create frustration over time. Likewise, too much work causes burnout, while too little work breeds boredom.

This is where resource visibility doubles down on business benefits. It’s not just about improving client and stakeholder satisfaction. It’s about employee experience, too.

Resource visibility provides real time insights into workload, skills, and even interests at organizational, team, and individual level. So you can:

• Create balanced workloads that challenge and engage, but never overwhelm
• Match employees with work aligned to their skills and interests
• Identify career development opportunities through stretch assignments

In turn, this can increase engagement and loyalty, creating a productive and positive work culture. Moreover, it can reduce turnover, costs, and disruption, as well as helping you establish a reputation as an employer of choice - making future recruitment efforts easier.

How Veramed increased resource visibility with Runn 

Clinical data experts Veramed use Runn to improve their real-time resource visibility and it’s been a gamechanger. They can now plan months in advance instead of weeks, confidently forecasting capacity and taking on more work.

Long-term views changed the game for us. Before Runn, we lacked the detailed data to understand why projects needed more time and couldn’t quickly spot when budgets might get overrun. Now, we can make proactive adjustments with clear data, match projects with the right resources, and manage scope and capacity effectively – ensuring we’re never left in the dark." - Toni Mitchell, Veramed’s Head of Operational Excellence