10x Greater Report Accuracy for AstraZeneca through DWH Modernization on AWS

The Challenge

Organizations in the Pharmaceutical sector rely on continually evolving data and insights to enhance their ability to target and meet the emerging needs of their physicians (customers) and patients. Due to strict industry regulations that dictate how the pharmaceutical sector stores and manages data, data inputs are often consistent across the industry; however, how organizations internally analyze and leverage their data can provide a vastly differentiating advantage.

As a Data Centric organization, AstraZeneca Canada’s on-premise system was becoming outdated and inadequate in a rapidly evolving industry. They felt that the data that they had was not being leveraged to the fullest of its potential and further, provided inconsistent information that didn’t allow for accurate insights. Source data was easily manipulated by business users which resulted in distrust. AstraZeneca needed to implement a modernized platform that would create a single repository of trusted information, across their organization.

Solution Searching

AstraZeneca sought an innovative solution that would allow them to leverage data so they could quickly extract insights that would drive their strategic decisions, better targeting customers and exploring unexploited markets. The Global organization had already made the conscious decision to leverage AWS as a cloud provider, ensuring a global and scalable solution eliminating the need for costly local on-premise systems.

The complexity and intricacy of the solution to be implemented required a partner with deep technical skillset and a history of driving successful projects. Knowing Zelusit’s AWS platform experience firsthand from personal relationships on their team, they were confident in our ability to deliver fast and impactful results. Zelusit was engaged to review the current state, roadmap and implement a modernized platform that would retire AstraZeneca’s legacy system and allow them to quickly leverage their data.

The Solution

Zelusit architected and implemented an enterprise Data Warehouse, leveraging Amazon Redshift to replace AstraZeneca’s on-premise Oracle and Business Objects solution, instilling a set of Governance best practices and accelerators to ensure trust and accuracy. A typical project of this size and scope can require 8-12 month delivery time. By leveraging AWS and best practices, Zelusit could do it in half the time. The conscious change from Oracle to Redshift ensure a reduction in cost and increase in performance.

The value to the organization resided in ensuring the lines of business to access and analyse data quickly and knowing that the data was accurate. AstraZeneca had some foundational technical elements of Data Governance in place. Through best practice implementation, Zelusit assisted AstraZeneca in quickly operationalize a Data Governance organization ensuring trust in the source data.

The shift from a very centralized Business Objects reporting environment to an AWS system with MicroStrategy front-end reporting allowed AstraZeneca to limit access to their data source and protect its integrity. Zelusit defined the scope of all metrics to reduce ambiguity and empower employees to leverage and transform as they needed. By enabling Self-Service BI & Analytics, the organization was able to access their trusted data quickly and efficiently, creating value along the commercialization initiatives.

The combination of self-service, data governance and cloud agility enabled the quick migration of 200+ reports and dashboards for AstraZeneca to leverage for intelligent insights.

Impact

AstraZeneca was able to extract value out of its data set immediately. The overall solution was recognized as best-in-class. The complete architecture and business operationalization of Data Governance resulted in 175 unique data quality issues being resolved thanks to Zelusit’s solution. The output of the reports within the new system versus the legacy system had an accuracy that was 10 times greater. Similar elements from relevant data sources were properly examined and provided clarity and validation. As a result, what became published was a precise number, ready to be actioned against.

AstraZeneca was impressed with our expertise delivering our alternative strategies for a solution. They shifted from the initial request for a solution that required additional time and costs, to one with a tactical design difference, enabling on-time delivery and cost efficiency with spectacular results. Our client was appreciative of what they learned through their experience with us and, by adopting the solution without future modifications, can now propel their business forward.