How Astellas Built a Global Policy Function with FiscalNote

Finding an effective way to help team members across geographies stay aligned on policy and regulatory developments, advocacy plans, and strategy was one of the main challenges facing the global policy and government affairs team at Astellas, a leading pharmaceutical manufacturing company. 

Astellas works to turn innovative science into value for patients through the creation, acceleration, and offering of reliable pharmaceutical products. Headquartered in Japan and operating in over 30 countries with more than 15,000 employees across the Americas, Asia, Eurasia, Middle East, and Africa, Astellas has an expansive global footprint with subsidiaries spanning across a wide range of markets. 

Given its high number of operations around the world, Adam Miller, head of policy and government affairs, international markets at Astellas US, faced this challenge head-on by leveraging FiscalNote's global policy solutions as a central piece of his toolkit.

Miller and the international commercial markets division are largely responsible for shaping durable and sustainable policies, regulations, and government affairs activities that improve patient lives worldwide. 

“Our division works in an integrated, cross-collaborative manner with a variety of internal key business functions, and with local, regional and global stakeholders to ensure proactive political and policy engagement across more than 30 markets,” Miller says.

Creating a Digitized, Centralized Coordinating Hub with FiscalNote's Global Policy Solutions

Prior to using FiscalNote, the widespread team relied on various internal systems and resources to communicate both internally and externally across regions. Without any centralized database, the ways in which team members interacted were largely individualized as every office had its own way of sharing and storing information. “FiscalNote has been of high value in a variety of situations that demanded rapid and coordinated responses,” Miller says. 

For teams operating in different countries and time zones, having access to a central repository of priority messaging, documents, files, and links becomes increasingly necessary to keep everyone informed and aligned on the latest developments. 

“Across multiple continents, we were able to manage our advocacy efforts and policy coordination regarding regulatory market access, pricing, and intellectual property challenges specific to our commercialized assets,” says Miller. “It was critical to ensure we were able to manage these simultaneously with limited resources, and we achieved a successful outcome in each case.”

Having access to this information on-the-go makes it all the more valuable for the government affairs function. “Policy and advocacy folks want information in a mobile environment. Part of why FiscalNote is such a great system is because it allows us to put everything in one, user-friendly format 𑁋 available via desktop or mobile,” Miller says.

Identifying Risks and Opportunities from Regulatory Developments Worldwide

Before using FiscalNote's global policy solutions, efficiently monitoring legislative and regulatory developments emerging far beyond the United States was another challenge Miller was looking to solve. Certain markets offered regional tracking services while others did not 𑁋 and there was no uniform way to track and share policy developments at the country level. 

“You can walk into Washington, throw a nickel down a street and run into legislative tracking service. Nobody, or very few, do international tracking,” Miller says. “FiscalNote improved our efficiency by automatically tracking and monitoring legislation and regulation that may greatly affect our ability to ensure access for our patients globally.” 

Having insights into key markets and responding in real-time is critical in the global policy and advocacy arena and demonstrating how your team’s work helped in removing barriers or influencing a particular outcome can be just as important. 

“FiscalNote has been able to help us track so many issues, many of which can change overnight and greatly impact our patient’s ability to access our products. Having a single, shared platform that our international affiliates can utilize to manage and monitor policy developments in real-time is critical to both our organization and our patients,” Miller adds.  

Streamlining Stakeholder Management Across Global Governments

Another core focus for Miller revolves around developing and maintaining relationships and alliances with local governments, affiliates, and other influential stakeholders across markets. With a nimble team covering such a large territory, being able to expand their reach to critical stakeholders had quickly become increasingly important. “FiscalNote’s centralized platform provides updates and resources to our affiliates that need to stay informed on priority global policy trends affecting the industry,” Miller says. 

For businesses operating across complex market environments, having a dynamic stakeholder management tool in place is key. To be successful, Astellas needs to not only keep internal stakeholders around the world aligned but also effectively manage relationships and engagements with external stakeholders. “[FiscalNote] enables us to build out our stakeholder engagement strategies across markets, which allows greater collaboration and increases success rates on objectives and goals,” Miller adds.

Building a Succesful Strategy with FiscalNote's Global Policy Solutions

Mitigate risk, identify opportunities, and spot trends by managing global policy updates and stakeholder relationships in one place with FiscalNote's global policy solutions. With boots on the ground in various cities and countries, you need to be able to drive alignment across your team and share insights on cross-cutting issues. FiscalNote’s collaboration and workflow tools enable users to quickly share knowledge on global developments as they're unfolding — enabling you to focus your efforts on a winning action plan.

Our expansive directory of public policy data enables you to manage policy developments across 21 countries and counting. You'll also be able to better understand the stakeholder networks affecting your organization by keeping track of engagements in a platform you can easily access no matter where you are.