Skip to content
← back to all case studies

Roche: Increasing value for a complex data platform

Learn how a leading global pharmaceuticals company increased the value of their data platform with Datavid's expertise.

Roche logo
  • about customer icon About the customer

    Roche, a top 3 pharma company, is at the forefront of biotechnology, and has a long history (dating 125 years back!) of patient treatment success and innovation.

  • headquarters icon Headquarters

    European Economic Area

  • industry icon Industry

    Pharmaceuticals

  • company size icon Company size

    10000+

  • quick metrics icon Quick metrics
    • » Improved system performance and increased efficiency
    • » Significantly increased agility of the software release cycle
    • » Reduced overall costs to save millions in infrastructure
  • technology used icon Technology used
    • MarkLogic
    • Apache NiFi
  • solutions offered icon Solutions offered
    • Data architecture
    • Data engineering
  • use cases icon Use cases
    • Clinical data management
    • Regulatory compliance

Full case study

CUSTOMER WEBSITE →

CHALLENGES

Increasing the value of a cross-department system

At the forefront of delivering innovative healthcare to patients around the world, Roche generates a lot of data for researchers to use daily. The company implemented a cross-department data platform but was incurring performance issues and slow feature delivery. Datavid performed an initial architecture review of the system, identifying areas of improvement and cost optimization.

SOLUTION

Architectural improvements & a new delivery model

After conducting an architectural review, it became clear that the delivery model of the system was leaking money as it lacked key testing and deployment automations.

The development and deployment process was a waterfall/agile hybrid.

The combination of waterfall project management and lack of automations resulted in high costs for releasing new features to the system.

There were two primary areas of work:

  1. Architecture: Datavid produced a report with steps on how to improve the design of the system, including cost estimates and delivery timelines.
  2. The delivery model: an integrated continuous delivery pipeline was proposed to automate how new features were released to the production system.

Datavid did several Proof of Concepts (PoCs) to validate the solutions before implementing them into the production system.

Both areas are now in continuous development (with the delivery pipeline started in July 2021), and the client is already experiencing benefits from the improvements.

RESULTS

Increasing performance & reducing release times

As a result of the performance issues solved via the architectural re-design of the system, the client reduced their costs significantly and increased the efficiency of the system.

The second benefit they have experienced is a significantly shorter delivery cycle from ideation through development and all the way to production.

Both of these benefits are moving the client towards the goal of increasing the value of their investment and making the system as efficient as possible while maintaining a good user experience.

In summary, an architecture based on best practice, a more automated delivery pipeline, and faster cycle times led to higher productivity and an improved ROI.

 
New call-to-action