Developing a support strategy to meet current and future requirements isn’t as easy as it sounds. It entails validating the current state, applying application roadmaps, and evaluating the future requirements of the business in terms of technology adoption, lifecycles, and scalability. The end goal is to create a flexible support structure meeting the needs of the future state—based on a clearly defined, long-term strategy—while accommodating short-term variations in response to changing market conditions.
The Challenge
The adoption of a shared services model triggered rapid growth at a large Pharmaceutical company; however, their financial applications support team was struggling to keep up with day-to-day tasks due to bottlenecks and process inefficiencies. Leadership was unable to focus on strategic planning as their time was spent on fixing daily application issues.
How Stratos Consulting Helped
Stratos Consulting was brought in to help optimize the Pharmaceutical company’s multi-year support roadmap based on current and future-state technologies and team structures with the goal of ensuring the department’s long-term success.
- Evaluated current state infrastructure and support models – Analyzing the financial data warehouse (FDW), including Oracle databases and data warehouse, Informatica data integration tools, and Hyperion financial and workforce planning and reporting platforms, to see if core architecture was scalable in line with project demand
- Proposed future state support model – In addition to examining indexes, partitions, data volume growth, data validation processes, and more, Stratos facilitated workshops with the financial application support team to capture end-to-end processes of the support model as it relates to FDW, Hyperion, and Informatica environments
- Created a multi-year support roadmap to address the continued evaluation and scaling of the FDW ecosystem. As technologies and processes evolve and recommended enhancements to the core architecture of the FDW based on best practices and the latest innovations in database technology platforms
The Result
Stratos delivered an executive presentation that captured the key elements of the project and proposed a multi-year support roadmap aligned with the Pharmaceutical company’s projected growth, including additional headcount, managed services support, and new technology requirements. We also provided a comprehensive change management plan for implementing our suggested recommendations.
Contact us today to discuss a current and future state assessment and roadmap for your organization’s systems and processes, or learn more about Stratos Consulting’s advisory services for life sciences.
