Data Warehouse Case Study

Implement a data warehouse approach for pharmaceutical sales that ensures regulatory compliance across multiple countries.

Problem: a global pharmaceutical company faced significant operational inefficiencies due to fragmented data silos across multiple departments. Sales data resided in disparate systems such as legacy transactional databases, Excel spreadsheets, and various third-party CRM platforms. This made it challenging to achieve a "single source of truth" for pricing and product details. The firm committed to purchase of data warehouse software, but needed an approach to implementation and change management communication across their sales outlets.

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Key Findings

The software provider presented actionable methods for providing usable data models, regulatory audit trails, and automation to improve reporting accuracy. The client needed to understand and document the current state and top priorities for making the change. Once there was buy-in from executive management, a detailed plan for navigating the changes from the current to the new state. In addition, specific differences in HR and sales regulations across countries required some customization in approach for each country.

Solution

Take a “plan globally, but implement locally” approach to ensure stakeholders are comfortable with a large amount of change over a long period of time. Conduct project kick-off events with each sales team, schedule and complete interviews to understand challenges for each team and suggested remediations. Assign local change ‘champions’ who are invested in the success of the project and understand details of their deliverables. Build a robust feedback loop to ensure that local voices have a say over time and remain engaged.