_Microsoft’s Cloud Enterprise Data Platform pilot deployment for pharmaceutical giant

Summary

One of the pharmaceutical industry’s leaders, a drug manufacturer, has decided to take advantage of the opportunities provided by Microsoft Azure. The company has been continuously operating for over 80 years and is one of the leaders of the European pharmaceutical market. Annually, its factories leave several hundred million packages of medicines for markets worldwide.

The main challenge they faced was effectively using collected data. While cleaning, modeling, and analyzing data extracted from the production line had already begun, a decision had yet to be made on how to manage and use this data best.

The pharmaceutical company turned to Transition Technologies PSC (TT PSC) because it needed to test a new solution integrated with the manufacturer’s systems ( I/O(Input/Output), ERP, and cloud) on a small scale. Ultimately, a full-scale implementation should enable in-depth analysis of all enterprise data gathered in one place.

Business Challenges

• Integration gaps could cause downtime and data flow errors and limit the ability to respond quickly to changes in the business environment. #SystemIntegration
• Risk of budget overruns, unforeseen costs, and financial planning difficulties that could negatively impact project profitability. #CostEstimation
• Lack of data contextualization could lead to incorrect business decisions, low-quality conclusions, and loss of competitive advantage. #DataContextualization
• Low system performance and stability could lead to frequent failures, downtime, and limited ability to scale operations in line with the company’s growing needs. #SystemEfficiency
• The limited ability of the company to independently manage and develop the system could lead to dependence on external suppliers, higher maintenance costs, and project delays. #SystemExpandability

Solution

To overcome the above challenges of the drug manufacturer, TT PSC experts first had to complete the following tasks:

• Confirm technical feasibility and connectivity mechanisms for all I/O data acquisition interfaces to ERP and Microsoft Cloud.
• Estimating the cost of cloud-based architecture based on deployed use case and data volumes.
• Checking the mechanism of “data contextualization”* in the communications layer. (*adding contextual information to the original data to make it more meaningful and relevant)
• Evaluate the workload and required in-house competencies for future development.
• Verify the customer’s possession of the necessary internal competencies needed for the future development of this solution.

One of the most common pain points for manufacturing companies is having a large stock of data collected over the years from many machines working not infrequently in factories scattered around the world. This makes it challenging to analyze this data and obtain useful insights fully. 

The main challenge in this project proved to be the lack of a data centralization tool that would allow for full analysis of the data gathered in one place (a single source of truth).

The solution proposed by TT PSC experts is a scalable Microsoft Cloud Enterprise Data Platform that enables analytics in organizations while reducing costs, optimizing existing data, and making it easier to manage. Microsoft Fabric, combined with other Azure services, provides comprehensive data integration and real-time analytics without compromising data privacy and security.

Proof of Concept Milestones

Methods and technologies used

• Azure Well-Architected Framework/Cloud Adoption Framework
• Microsoft Azure
• Microsoft Fabric (Data Factory, Data Activator, Synapse, Power BI).
• IoT Hub
• Stream Analytics

Result

The pilot confirmed the ability to implement an easy-to-use analytics tool and data center, providing increased business flexibility. It also supports the organization in breaking down data silos and eliminating unnecessary data sprawl. When deployed at scale, the solution will ensure the growing use of BI to support a data-driven organization with LOB (line of business) and teams. Integrated with the company’s systems and scalable, Microsoft’s Cloud Enterprise Data Platform is also about making data more accessible to technical and non-technical users in a regulated and secure manner.