A Fortune 500 pharmaceutical company and a leading provider of medicines to fight cancer, cardiovascular disease and infectious diseases, with over a century of experience has grown to become a global health care leader, developing and providing innovative pharmaceuticals and other health care products.
The company faced a unique set of challenges. Not only does it operate in a heavily-regulated industry, but the company’s operations extend internationally – bringing it under multiple and widely varying sets of regulations. The company saw an opportunity to embrace these challenges and make data quality a central part of its operations, allowing it to work smarter to become more profitable.
The company is already accustomed to dealing with vast amounts of data, since it offers an impressive number of products, each produced from complex manufacturing processes that carry extremely detailed auditing requirements. Also, because the auditing requirements are tracked differently from country to country, the same item can be identified multiple times as different products.
The company’s interaction with its customers also has to conform to strict guidelines. As a company that prides itself on going above and beyond mandated requirements, it requires complete, accurate, and unified customer master records for day-to-day operations.
To help the company turn its data into a more valuable corporate asset, the organization sought to enhance their existing data quality and data management initiatives to better support master data and data governance programs.
The company chose DataFlux technology to extend data quality routines across the enterprise as web services. The unique graphical user interface gives business users control over data quality routines, allowing subject matter experts to apply their knowledge directly to business rules that are integrated into the data infrastructure. This strengthens auditing processes and provides more direct control over the integrity of key data elements.
The company also found that, beyond the technology, the DataFlux methodology of analyzing, improving and controlling data complimented its existing business processes. The in-depth DataFlux methodology encompasses people, processes and technology – allowing companies to make better business decisions and gain a competitive edge. The five technology building blocks of the DataFlux methodology are data profiling, data quality, data integration, data enrichment and data monitoring – steps which enable organization to understand, improve and maintain high-quality data.
The company found that DataFlux technology integrated easily with its existing infrastructure. Using the workflow creation tools of dfPower Studio, the company was soon able to launch a comprehensive project to create master records for customer information. DataFlux technology provided the ability to cleanse, standardize and match customer information across existing sources, helping the company to gain more value from this critical data.
Moreover, the company found that the vision offered by a more effective data quality program had the power to make them more competitive. High-quality data offered this organization the opportunity to manage costs more effectively and create an informational platform for greater innovation and excellence. The company saw DataFlux technology as an enabler of change throughout the organization, allowing data stewards to serve a key role in making data quality central to the company’s operations.