OM Pharma: Building an Efficient Cross-Functional Data Foundation for Rapid Growth

A global vision for cross-functional efficiency

OM Pharma is a growing biotech based in Geneva, transforming immune health with therapies to prevent respiratory and urinary tract infections, as well as small molecules for the treatment of vascular diseases. As of 2024, OM Pharma’s products have reached more than 16.7 million people globally, and the company maintains business partnerships in 100 countries with a team of 400 employees. To support rapid global growth, OM Pharma is establishing a digital foundation for cross-functional efficiency and data excellence.

“We really want to have in place an IT infrastructure that can deliver the speed required to help the business continue to grow,” said IT Applications Manager Violette Jerome.

That vision is based on a four-pillared strategy:

1. Improve customer and partner experience
2. Optimize operational efficiency to improve utilization and productivity
3. Increase workforce productivity with simplification and automation
4. Grow new revenue streams by removing redundancy

OM Pharma needed the right technology partner to overcome legacy challenges impacting efficiency, collaboration, and speed.

Overcoming legacy siloes and lack of data awareness

Like many biotechs, OM Pharma faced a number of obstacles in its pursuit of rapid global growth, including:

• Systems and functional siloes
• Lack of data awareness
• Operational inefficiency
• Lack of business agility

“Each department was deploying systems on their own, purchasing systems to respond to their business needs,” said Jerome. “They were defining processes, customizing objects, and adding applications without really looking at what other teams were doing.” As a result, it was difficult for teams to collaborate, because processes and data didn’t align. Often, this resulted in teams working outside of existing systems, which was duplicative, error-prone, and impacted visibility.

Functional silos contributed to an overall lack of data awareness across the company. Not only was data structured differently, but other teams couldn’t easily see or work with data across systems or departments. Greatly limiting business insights, the siloes also stifled agility and speed. “It was difficult for us to react quickly to a change in regulation, or adapt to a change in a certain domain, because our cross-functional processes and systems were not really built for that,” said Jerome.

As business areas adopted Veeva solutions, the small IT team saw an opportunity to improve operational efficiency and create a data foundation that would streamline processes and enable real-time data insights across functions.

Building a data foundation for rapid growth

With six Veeva Vaults in place across Development Cloud and Commercial Cloud, OM Pharma’s IT team began connecting processes and data across the product lifecycle and functions in clinical operations, regulatory, safety, medical, and commercial.

Figure 1: OM Pharma’s digital ecosystem powered by six Vaults

Creating a culture of data excellence

OM Pharma’s priority was to establish a culture of operational data excellence, which included: creating a single source of trusted data for each area, improving interoperability across systems and teams, and building awareness of the value of data and how it can be leveraged or used to improve the business.

“The idea was to have all the key master data managed in the Veeva applications. And connect and transfer data within Veeva, but also cross-system with our data lake so we can generate more insights and increase the speed of decision-making,” said Jerome.

The initiative included:

• Multilevel governance and alignment: Focus on aligning systems to cross-functional businesses
• Education on data value: Understand the value of clean and connected data and how it can be leveraged for accurate targeting and insights
• Connected platform with continued innovation: Enable coordination across teams with greater visibility, and keep pace with regulations and upgrades
• Authoritative trusted source of data: Define key reference data in each application and improve quality and control of automatic data flow across systems

In many cases, these initiatives required a significant data mindset shift for end users. “In my previous experience, I had a lot of people who were generating data and drawing conclusions from data without knowing what is really measured,” says Jerome. If the data isn’t clean and well understood, she said, it creates reporting errors and contributes to an overall lack of confidence in the data.

“You need to be much clearer and more precise on what the data is about, what you are measuring, so you can make good conclusions from those data,” said Jerome.

Establishing a data governance model

To achieve its vision for operational data excellence, OM Pharma established a data governance model. The company took a three-phased approach, including: cross-Veeva governance for Veeva applications; data governance across all applications; and cross-system governance to harmonize and connect data across the entire organization to support cross-functional processes.

The company created new roles to align identification and management of key data across teams, including:

• Data owners: Heads of department or function who are responsible and accountable for data across the organization. Data owners understand where and how their data is used.
• Data stewards: Team members who maintain the data, including quality control, data cleaning, and data enrichment. They also create and update related SOPs on managing high-quality data.

For the company’s Vaults, the governance model increases business efficiency. Business process owners focus on bringing in and owning the right technology solutions for their business. Data is maintained cross-functionally by the data owners and data stewards, who develop data policies globally and per function, improving how data is leveraged and increasing business impact. This cross-system vision with connected data and processes across functions makes sure data is clean and connected, while perfectly balancing autonomy and collaboration.

“If somebody is looking for safety information, the place to go is the Safety Vault, not on SharePoint or on another platform,” says Jerome. “Any department that needs safety data knows that the data is in the Safety Vault, and the data can be shared and transferred easily. They also have better trust in the data that they get because they know it is coming from the Veeva Safety platform.”

Figure 2: OM Pharma’s cross-Veeva governance model

Connecting processes and data across the business

With a culture of operational data excellence and a data governance structure in place, OM Pharma now has the foundation for cross-functional value with Veeva Connections. The company is focused on:

• RIM-Clinical Operations Connection to accelerate submissions times.
• RIM-PromoMats Connection to reduce the time to submit compliance packages and access in-use labeling docs.
• Safety-RIM Connection to improve data quality and speed up case processing time.
• Medical-Safety Connection to automatically share AEs identified by the medical team with safety, shortening time from AE reporting to case closure.

Figure 3: Connecting business processes and data across Vaults

In addition to Veeva Connections, OM Pharma’s Vault ecosystem helps teams collaborate on Veeva’s validated releases three times a year using a risk-based validation approach. It also helps drive awareness of new solutions or features that support business growth and innovation. For example, the clinical operations team adopted a key TMF capability to auto-classify content files and match classified content to EDLs. They’re sharing those learnings with the regulatory team as they consider implementing RIM capabilities to automate document classification for submission content.

Because the teams are all working on the same platform, OM Pharma can ensure that the Vaults are evolving while making the right decisions for each function. “This is where you need a strong partnership with your vendor, with your IT business partner,” says Jerome. “They need to understand the challenges you’re facing, what each team wants to do, and at which speed they want to do it.”

Delivering cross-functional efficiency and data excellence

“What we have really aimed for is to have an IT infrastructure that is modern, fully integrated, and have on top of that a data flow which is easily accessible and easily shared across the different applications,” said Jerome.

Transformation at OM Pharma revolves around four pillars:

• Faster data insights by increasing data literacy and collaborating on a single source of trusted information
• Seamless cross-functional data flow and alignment on key data and definitions
• Higher user adoption with simple UIs and consistent experiences across applications
• Speeding up the supply chain by quickly connecting market information to operations

“Veeva is a central platform for our digital transformation. Not only does it deliver value in the functional areas, but adding data and analytics governance on top of it is also very critical for us to drive greater value,” said Jerome.

Hear OM Pharma’s full multi-Vault success story on Veeva Connect, and learn more about Veeva Development Cloud.