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
Sagent’s existing data and analytics solutions were outdated and misaligned with plans for future growth. As the pharmaceutical company prepared to evolve its manufacturing from virtual outsourcing to a hybrid model involving traditional internal manufacturing, achieving consistent visibility across departments was a strategic imperative. However, Sagent lacked enterpriselevel data management and reporting capabilities, hindering insight into numerous critical areas such as:
Inventory replenishment: facing regular inventory shortages from limited supply and capacity at third-party contract manufacturer organizations, Sagent needed the ability to better prioritize and time long-term replenishment purchase orders according to projected stock outages, while expanding its supply chain to use multiple replenishment sources.
Forecast planning: Sagent’s process required multiple departments to closely collaborate on a quarterly basis to plan product expansions and reductions, requiring input from more than 13 internal and external data sources for each current and potential product. Extensive time and resources were needed to assemble information into a digestible format suitable for leadership meetings, often resulting in less timely decisions due to latent or incomplete data.
SOLUTION
Sagent again partnered with Mavent, this time to implement the enterprise data warehouse (EDW) that was recommended in the prior Analytics Strategy and Roadmap phase. Collaborating with Sagent’s CFO and VP of IT, Mavent supported Sagent’s EDW build in the following ways:
- Developed an AWS cloud solution architecture, implementing all components
- Created a best practice Talend platform for managing all data integrations to and from Sagent’s cloud EDW with full audit, balance and controls capabilities to ensure the highest levels of data quality and integrity
- Leveraging Talend, integrated all strategic internal and external data sources to enable multiple reporting and visualization projects, plus future advanced analytics needs
- Implemented a Tableau solution, rolling out enterprise-wide dashboards and data visualization capabilities to support both day-to-day operational decision-making and longer-term strategic planning activities
- Implemented a new supplier performance dashboard that integrated KPIs across dozens of sources—from purchase orders to inventory, transit activity, customer demand, sales and forecasts.
- Improved forecasting by integrating previous data projects and external market data feeds into the new EDW with Tableau visualizations to meet the on-demand information needs of Sagent’s executive leaders.
OUTCOMES
- Delivered a single source of truth: integrated critical internal and external data sources, significantly improving data quality, reducing information latency and enabling new insights and greater visibility into multiple areas of the business.
- Implemented multiple data visualization dashboard solutions for several key areas: inventory management, order replenishment, supplier performance management, sales and forecasting, wholesaler inventory, customer contracts, product pricing and industry/competitor analysis.
- Streamlined inventory replenishment: a new supplier performance dashboard provides fact-based metrics to manage supplier relationships more proactively.
- Accelerated forecast planning: significantly diminished time and effort to prepare for strategy meetings, drastically reducing data latency to hours, vs. days or weeks.
