Client Successes: Pharmaceutical/Life Sciences

Global Medical Data Warehouse provides access to integrated clinical trial management information and delivers a more consistent global view of clinical trial activities

Business Challenge

The Global Business Technology Team for a major pharmaceutical firm was the functional group responsible for delivering the systems which manage the day to day operations of its internal customers.  The team needed to establish a data warehousing and reporting solution which would provide a global view of integrated clinical trial management information.  The company recognized that an investment in new technologies would provide opportunities to better track information related to clinical trials.  The company also recognized that such an investment is a key component to differentiating itself in the market.

Business Challenge

The company’s analysis of clinical trial information was based on three decision support data marts each of which were being fed directly or indirectly by a number of data sources. The client’s architecture was hampering performance improvements due to the following limitations:

• No single integration point between source and subscribing systems, requiring multiple reconciliations and duplication of work across subscribing systems whenever a source system changed
• Variations in timeliness and freshness of data across subscribing systems and reports
• Redundant source system data, with no identified authoritative source
• No overall unified security architecture
• Reporting across business areas and functions was time-consuming and costly
• Integration of information was limited to the level of an individual subscribing system.
• Interfaces to relevant source systems were not shared across subscribing systems causing high implementation costs for new data marts
• Little consistency in ETL processes and integration schemes
• Redundant data entry due to the high costs of linking systems in the absence of a common information architecture

They needed a solution that would deliver more value to their management team and users, without increasing overall costs and complexity.  A Global Medical Data Warehouse was to be built to deliver the following:

• Reduced business and technology reconciliation and quality assurance effort
• Decreased risk in decisions based on current data mart reporting
• Improved data quality in the existing data marts
• Better integration of Medical Information
• Decreased cost to implement new data marts
• Decreased cost to add new information
• Improved integration of relevant data and supporting documents that will result in shared insight across the global audience of information consumers

CSI Solution

This client engaged CSI to establish an overall architecture and vision for the GMDW data warehouse.  CSI first provided an analysis of the information held in the key data sources.  CSI then developed a technical architecture for the GMDW and the ETL routines to ensure the consistent and predictable loading of data from the specified sources into the GMDW.

The GMDW data warehouse was implemented on an Oracle database, including all necessary tables, tablespaces, indexes, constraints and other database artifacts. 

• Work 100% of the time with minimal manual intervention
• Provide a standard infrastructure
• Integrate with their current and future systems
• Provide flexibility for ongoing growth and enhancement
• Support the integration of new data sources
• Support a growing reporting environment
• Support current and future industry and marketplace standards
• Improve the performance of  delivery and access to information
• Improve the level of data integration
• Meet an aggressive introduction schedule
• Be easily implemented and supported by Pfizer
• Provide a reasonable return on investment

The Global Medical Data Warehouse provides access to integrated clinical trial management information and delivers a more consistent global view of clinical trial activities available to all medical applications.  The delivery of consistent integrated and structured information enables greater decision-support capabilities.  IT costs were also reduced due to the elimination of excess reporting systems and the reduction in associated maintenance costs.

Return on Investment

Through the sun-setting of legacy applications and utilizing the existing infrastructure, CSI was able create dynamic, flexible ad hoc reporting using standard ETL tools like Informatica, Oracle and Business Objects.  Through reducing and redeploying hardware, maintenance costs were reduced, creating returns on investment.