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About Bricks

A brick is a collection of accounts and contacts, normally in a common geographic area. The primary purpose of a brick is to allow a company to publish RSA (retail sales analysis) data while making sure that specific sales cannot be tracked to a particular contact or account. For more information on creating bricks, see Administering Bricks.

IMS Health publishes retail sales data and determines the definition of bricks. Brick definitions are reviewed every six months and adjusted to make sure that the brick is as small as possible while providing the required level of anonymity.

In countries where physician-level prescription data is not available, brick data is a key measure of return on a pharmaceutical company's investment in sales promotion. In these markets, most pharmaceutical sales territories are built based on brick data available for that country. This provides a meaningful way to measure performance over time.

How Bricks Work in Siebel Pharma

In Siebel Life Sciences, you can associate a contact or an account address with a brick. A contact can be associated with multiple bricks and an account with multiple addresses can have one brick for each address.

This implementation of Siebel Pharma also supports "mini-bricks." Mini-brick data is a subset of brick data that narrows the number of contacts and accounts in a geographic area. Mini-bricks provide a more detailed view of an area, without identifying the individuals in the unit.

It is the Siebel administrator's responsibility to set up and maintain brick definitions as well as associate bricks with account addresses and contacts. For more information on associating a brick with an account address, see Associating a Brick with an Account Address.