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Bristol Myers Squibb Discusses the Value of a Platform Services Approach

This year we were fortunate to have 4,000+ participants for the Veeva R&D and Quality Summit Connect, including 400+ pharma professionals in the Veeva Development Cloud and Vault Platform track. Throughout the day, industry leaders—including Eli Lilly, EQRx, Pacira, and Seagen—shared their insights for connecting functional silos, accelerating drug delivery, and taking advantage of continual innovation. In addition, Veeva leaders demonstrated how the Veeva Development Cloud provides an operating system for the full lifecycle of product operations and how to optimize that investment through best practices in release management, workflows, security, and reporting.

Scalable Platform Operating Model

In the keynote session, Dinesh Salvi discussed how Bristol Myers Squibb (BMS) increased IT and business efficiency with a centralized approach to platform management and governance. The Veeva footprint at BMS spans clinical operations, quality, regulatory, safety, and commercial with Salvi leading the single enterprise platform team that owns all of the digital capabilities—from strategy through deployment to ongoing operation and enhancement.

Salvi compared BMS’s platform operating model to a combined Center of Excellence (CoE) and Community of Practice (CoP) that manages Veeva Development Cloud applications as a single solution.

He described some of the roles required to make the model successful, including cross-Vault delivery leaders, operations teams, architects, and project managers. Collaboration with stakeholders inside and outside BMS is key. The platform services team works closely with business units, business process owners, other IT functions, and Veeva. “We are all partners in the process,” Salvi said.

Achieving Consistency and Efficiency

Salvi shared several helpful pieces of advice for driving consistency, efficiency, and continuous improvement across the Veeva Development Cloud. For example, with each release, the platform services team partners with the business to prioritize new features, which are then delivered via a global agile release process. A designated lead coordinates platform-level changes across all Vault applications simultaneously. For other features, the organization tests and proves out a capability in one Vault, developing a best practice implementation that “allows us to execute the next set of implementations more effectively.”

Driving Success into the Future

BMS continues to evolve how the platform services team works, but Salvi said, “the strategy has proven to be very successful for us.” With their Veeva implementation, the BMS team has reduced costs, risks, and technical debt; accelerated time to market; and increased enterprise alignment and innovation. According to Salvi, adopting and managing Veeva Development Cloud as an enterprise platform has transformed how both IT and the business operate. He advised other Veeva customers to consider a platform strategy “as soon as you have your second Vault.”

To learn more about BMS’s experience with a platform services model, including recommendations for getting started, watch this keynote session on demand at Veevaconnect.com.

Interested in learning more about how Veeva can help?