OVERVIEW
Sagent Pharmaceuticals, Inc., a Nichi-Iko Group Company, is a specialty pharmaceutical company focused on developing, manufacturing, sourcing and marketing pharmaceutical products for the North American market, with a specific emphasis on injectables. Sagent is headquartered in Schaumburg, Illinois.
CHALLENGE
With an eye toward future growth, Sagent realized that its current data and analytics solutions would not support long-term business plans. Sagent lacked consistent visibility across the business as it prepared to evolve from a virtual outsourced pharmaceutical manufacturer to one that included more traditional internal manufacturing capabilities.
Although the pharmaceutical company had invested heavily in re-tooling back office operational systems such as ERP and CRM, Sagent lacked infrastructure for supporting enterprise level data management and reporting. Generating reports and analytics was difficult and time-consuming, often requiring dozens of manual collection and reconciliation efforts using tools like Microsoft Access and Excel. What’s more, most of Sagent’s critical order-to-cash operational data resided with their third-party logistics services provider, which added to the timing and reconciliation challenge. Sagent sought an experienced data analytics consulting partner to remedy its challenges.
SOLUTION
Engaged by Sagent’s CFO and VP of IT, Mavent Analytics conducted a two-phase Analytics Strategy assessment, starting with a current-state assessment and analytics opportunity prioritization, followed by a futurestate capabilities and roadmap development.
Our assessment focused on Sagent’s key internal and external data sources, data management and analytics technologies, processes and organization capabilities. Two dozen business leaders were interviewed to identify pain points, business improvement opportunities, and potential analytics and reporting project opportunities. Sagent’s executive leadership team joined us in workshops that helped drive consensus and alignment with top corporate priorities.
Working closely with Sagent’s team, we built their go-forward enterprise data warehouse strategy, identifying future state capabilities to achieve business initiatives across data architecture, technology, people and governance. This included a 24-month execution roadmap with budget estimates for needed capital investments and resources for both projects and people. We also determined technology gaps, identified vendor short-lists, facilitated RFP selection and negotiated the procurement of new data integration and data visualization tools.
OUTCOMES
- Developed an analytics project portfolio consisting of 37 diverse business initiatives that were prioritized based on business value and ability to deliver.
- Enabled Sagent leaders to quickly identify the “top 6” most critical initiatives with required capital investments.
- Created a program delivery roadmap that optimally sequenced projects for maximized business investment with minimized risk.
- Led the selection and acquisition of Sagent’s new technology stack that included AWS, Talend and Tableau to be used as the standard for future analytics and reporting projects.
- Designed Sagent’s BI program governance and project delivery models.
- Assisted Sagent in making its first strategic hire.
BY THE NUMBERS
