Industry
Life Sciences
Challenge
Dispersed policy content, repetitive employee queries, and long response times strained Roche's compliance support. An earlier internal initiative to centralise knowledge had stalled due to complexity, lack of structure, and IT dependencies.
Solution and Results
Datavid deployed a semantic knowledge base using Datavid Rover in just six weeks, unifying policy content, enabling self-service updates, and drastically reducing advisor workload—laying the groundwork for scalable, AI-powered compliance support.
About Roche
Roche has over 125 years of innovation in biotechnology and healthcare. Recognised globally for its scientific leadership, it consistently ranks among the top three pharma companies for its work in advanced therapies and diagnostics.Setting the Scene
In highly regulated industries like pharmaceuticals, compliance isn't optional, it’s business-critical. Fines can be massive and damage to the brand unrecoverable. For Roche, ensuring employees understand the rules is part of its operational DNA. Each year, its compliance advisors respond to thousands of employee questions for clarity.
Many are easily answered by reference to the Code of Conduct, HR Manual, or other documents or systems that made up the departmental knowledge base. Roughly a third of queries were repetitive, creating unnecessary overhead and delays, often exceeding 24 hours, which risked non-compliant actions by employees operating without timely guidance.
The vision was clear:
- Build a single, trustworthy knowledge base accessible to all employees
- Enable compliance teams to manage updates without relying on IT
But after two and a half years, the initiative stalled due to competing priorities. That’s when Roche turned to Datavid.
The Challenges
Despite Roche's clear commitment to compliance, its internal knowledge-sharing people and processes were strained by the volume of enquiries.
- Policy content lived across disconnected sources, in PDF documents, intranet pages, and spreadsheets, making answers hard to find and even harder to trust.
- Compliance advisors were acting as human routers, manually fielding upwards of 10,000 policy-related inquiries each year from employees across departments and geographies.
- Delays of 24+ hours left employees in limbo, increasing the risk of non-compliant decisions.
- Policy updates required IT, introducing days or weeks long delays and limiting agility.
The Solution
Datavid delivered a fully functional prototype in just a few weeks by combining expert-led execution with Datavid Rover, a semantic search and enrichment platform designed for speed, structure, scale and reuse.
The combination of Datavid’s expertise, Datavid Rover as an accelerator, and the client’s internal team enabled:
- Unified content: Ingesting policy documents and relational data from across repositories and relational databases into a single, searchable knowledge base.
- Automated enrichment: Extracting entities, tagging context, and generating smart classifications to build a foundational knowledge graph.
- Personalized responses: Delivering role-based access to relevant content by integrating legacy databases with access controls.
- Self-Service Updates: Enabling compliance teams to manage content directly eliminating IT dependency and accelerating updates.
The Outcomes
In just a few weeks, Roche had a fully functional prototype that offered
- Real-time answers: Employees received faster responses, with many queries resolved instantly.
- Expert productivity: Reduced advisor workload allowed experts to focus on complex, high-value issues.
- AI-ready infrastructure: Laid the groundwork for agentic workflows and AI-powered compliance support.
- Structured insight: Built a unified knowledge graph to support reuse, governance, and discovery.
With a modular architecture and strong metadata management, the system is now flexible enough to evolve fast enough to show immediate value. The immediate outcome was a reduced burden on advisors, allowing them to focus on other activities. Further, updates to the system can be administered by themselves without having to burden IT. 
What had stalled for years was now moving toward enterprise-wide impact, with the foundation laid for future agentic AI support.
Struggling with stalled policy automation or knowledge management initiatives?
Datavid accelerates delivery with DATAVID ROVER - its out-of-the-box platform that provides 80% of the required functionality in under 10 weeks, at a fraction of the cost of custom development.
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