With a single source of truth across the vast global organization, data-driven business agility and strategy becomes a given.
How does a Swiss pharmaceutical giant employing 30,000 employees drive enterprise-wide data democratization and optimize business processes?
Being a biotechnology company, Novartis depends heavily on data in its research. According to the firm’s Business Analytics COE Lead, Loic Giraud: “Data is part of our DNA at Novartis. The challenge we faced was in finding a platform that would allow all departments across the organization to consistently drive value from our data chain.”
Regardless of location or device, the firm wanted to enable the use of data-based insights across all business units, ensuring there is one single source of truth informing decision-making across the entire organization.
Six-figure savings achieved
The pharma giant’s strategic IT goals were realized when it adopted a new data integration and analytics cloud platform.
Its analytics strategy is designed to further optimize data-driven value creation across the entire company: from saving time and valuable resources, to optimizing processes and identifying new business opportunities.
With a company-wide uniform database and validated data quality, the firm now obtains reliable results that support decisions across every department from procurement and production to marketing, sales, finance and management.
The new analytics platform is helping Novartis achieve:
- A high level of automation, reducing error-prone manual processes
The analytics platform chosen by Novartis allows all divisions to easily incorporate very large data sets into analytics projects, so data-based decision-making can take place in near real-time. The high degree of automation also allows manual processes for standard tasks to be reduced. All data sources are easily connected, with no need for time-consuming copying and moving of data records when loading data into analysis applications or creating annual reports. This not only reduces the susceptibility to errors, but also creates time for employees to focus on their main job.
- Increased availability of analytics in the field
For the 20,000 sales representatives using the platform, the mobile-optimized dashboards have transformed their ability to access analytics in the field.
With these benefits, the firm reports a savings of six-figure sums through optimized budget and resource allocations.
The Swiss multinational pharmaceutical company is using Qlik Sense to drive enterprise-wide data democratization and optimize business processes. Its 30,000 employees have access to over 500 Qlik applications.
Continued Giraud: “The role of the Qlik platform in turning our ambitions for data into reality cannot be understated. The platform has not only digitally strengthened, optimized and expanded existing business areas, but is helping to open up new opportunities and is supporting the digital transformation of the entire organization.”
The way forward
Novartis chose this particular analytics platform because the company values high-performance analysis, optimal data availability, and an intuitive analytics experience that incorporates data from all sources without infrastructure barriers.
Data access and availability are controlled within a framework of centrally managed governance. Due to this democratization of all available data, the firm benefits from a comprehensive self-service operation of the analytics functions, including on mobile devices.
Going forward, Novartis also plans to expand the use of the Qlik analytics platform with location-based data: combining geographic data with various data sources to improve its existing geo-mapping and increase the value of the map visualizations.
The company is also now testing Qlik’s data integration solutions to accelerate and ease real time analytics and data unification of sources, such as SAP.
Said Wolfgang Kobek, SVP EMEA at Qlik: “Novartis is benefitting from the real-time and self-service capabilities, as well as the reduction of data silos and infrastructure hurdles. This offers them a great advantage in today’s market.”
