Business Requirement

AstraZeneca Global Finance Services (GFS) provides transactional finance services to the entire group through a Shared Services Centre in Kuala Lumpur, via six delivery centres operated by a leading Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) partner. The opportunity was to improve speed and consistency in performance reporting, to enhance service provision to all business functions including more than 70 markets worldwide. The resulting platform brought far greater speed, agility and consistency, replacing cumbersome, time-consuming and error-prone manual reporting.

Why Datalytyx?

“Datalytyx brings us value in three main ways,” says Stephen Hazlitt, Business Performance Director, AstraZeneca GFS. First, this is core business for Datalytyx: they really understand this area, its opportunities and requirements. They’ve worked on similar projects with other clients, so they know what works.

“Second, the Datalytyx style of client service strongly suggests they want to work with you: they’re not just interested in doing a job, getting paid and going home. They genuinely act as part of our team—it’s strong collaborative working every day. That’s so powerful.

“The third area is technology: they bring the technical understanding, in data and data manipulation in particular, with a skills set rare within in-house teams.”

Performance Platform Benefits

Hazlitt continues, “We need to illustrate that the finance services we provide are delivered to a high quality, using measures important to our internal customers. Once you have that visibility, it’s far easier to identify issues and have conversations on how you might improve. One way we worked with Datalytyx was putting in place a ‘standard’ set of performance scorecards and metrics for every customer group across the world, so you can quickly see issues and opportunities worldwide and drive positive effects on service delivery.”

Another important factor is for the same toolset, metrics and screens provided by Datalytyx to be used by
business customers, shared services staff, and our BPO provider. It’s vital in terms of decision-making for everyone to have the same information and insights to work from, allowing us to compare performance across the group and continually raise the bar.”

Data Lake Project Pulls Together Raw Operational Data

Hazlitt says the Data Lake is about “pulling together internal data assets from around the world. We wanted to avoid all the time consuming manual interventions and point-to-point integrations required to get all the
information and data out to support the global views we wanted.

“The Data Lake enables us to pull large volumes of valuable data from disparate systems into a single centralized manageable resource to enable new levels of visibility. Datalytyx has that expertise to supplement and enhance our own skills—they know ‘the art of the possible’ and what can be achieved.”

Talend: Superior Data Management

Hazlitt continues, “Talend is a well known and well understood technology. The critical advantage, for us, is the speed at which we could take disparate data assets, pull them together, manipulate them, and have them ready for presentation to our managers. The development time using Talend was really impressive.”

He says another core advantage of Talend is the ability to develop data processing natively on Hadoop and Amazon S3: “You might be pulling raw data into the Data Lake from, say, five or six or ten systems, and you
need to conform and structure all of that data, so all the different fields line up, the data is cleansed, and you can trust the data and then exploit it. Talend is an extremely powerful tool to achieve that.

“Of course, Talend does many other things, but for this project the key application for AstraZeneca is manipulating, conforming, cleansing and structuring large volumes of data—Big Data—that we can then use to
present insights back to our business managers.”

A ‘Goldmine of Data’

“The Data Lake aligns with our business priorities: there is a goldmine of data available to help our business to manage itself better going forward. We started using the Data Lake for certain projects and, each week, another manager will come in with a new set of business questions. We’ve really only scratched the surface of what’s possible.” Hazlitt adds, “I have recommended Datalytyx and Talend to other parts of AstraZeneca. There is no doubt in my mind that Datalytyx could add value to other organisations with similar
requirements, largely because of its collaborative and partnering approach. Datalytyx has the skills set, its people know what they’re doing, and—crucially—they can apply that expertise to your own business model.