Image courtesy of Avatour
Site meetings are an integral part of business for life sciences companies — whether supplier audits, internal quality assurance inspections, process reviews, or FDA inspections. Often, these site visits involve traveling long distances to bring auditors, experts, or global teams together. Pre-COVID, the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries spent enormous budgets on travel costs.
Direct expenses aren’t the only cost of these meetings. Those who travel for site visits incur a significant overhead of productive time lost in airports and hotels. On-site safety, security and cleanliness protocols are time-consuming and disruptive, often requiring the interruption of production for days at a time. And every outside individual brought into a lab or production facility creates some amount of risk.
Until now, life sciences companies have accepted these costs because there were…