Central Digital Business Platform for faster decision-making

Background

Over the course of its rich 200-year history, a large pharmaceutical enterprise created varied workflows and processes across sites. The steady inclusion of local business flavor and the growth in process variations, combined with workflow differences, had begun to affect the enterprise’s agility and its ability to deliver quick product releases. The enterprise needed a modern digital business platform that could provide end-to-end visibility to its manufacturing operations for faster decision-making.

Pain Point

The use of spreadsheets and manual reconciliation of workflows had steadily created a vast number of challenges for day-to-day operations. The enterprise lacked:

A single source of truth (SSOT)
Multiple data sources across sites placed barriers to acquiring consistent and usable insights.

Alignment between IT and business teams
Differences in needs between diverse parts of the enterprise combined with inefficient legacy processes prevented it from prioritizing and driving decisions.

Agile product releases
Siloed processes and traditional workflows prevented the enterprise from being nimble and efficient.

Solution

The organization needed a digital Central Business Platform that could act as a platform to support digital initiatives and provide visibility into manufacturing across the organization, monitor quality, and support smart manufacturing (see Key Objectives above).

Altimetrik studied the problem across 3 OPUs, 14 brands, 31 sites, 8,700+ SKUs, 129 CMOs, and 61 source systems to identify and cluster KPIs, standardize and digitize usage patterns and processes, and optimize operations.

The result was the design and execution of a Platform, that could, along with workflow automation, identify, address, and solve business problems. In addition, Altimetrik held workshops to drive business and IT synergies.


An incremental agile approach ensured the first release of the Platform was done within the first quarter, with subsequent releases every quarter. User feedback at every sprint helped align user aspirations with the ongoing backlog.

The Platform was designed to:

• Synergize quality data from multiple sites and multiple systems
• Deliver trusted digital products from a governed SSOT

The Outcomes

Efficiency
Reduced manual effort by more than 30,000 hour via digitized dashboards.

Cost
More than $20 M reduction in COGS by improving planning and utilization.

Productivity
More than $10 M in savings by eliminating redundant work.

Collaboration
Enhanced collaboration and transparency across functions.

Conclusion

The successful implemConclusionentation of the Platform allowed the pharmaceutical company to access data across the enterprise, enabling faster and better decision-making and quicker product releases.

‍Unified data, automated workflows, and end-to-end visibility of manufacturinghelped identify and solve business problems.

‍The digital transformation was pivotal to helping run processes at scale and create alignment between IT and business teams and transparency across functions.