GSK takes targeted approach to data-driven transformation

The pharmaceutical titan has developed a data strategy to mine value from its existing data with a series of analytics initiatives carefully targeted at specific business priorities.

Many organizations that strive to become data-driven ultimately struggle to get value from their data. Seemingly promising analytics proofs of concept fail to scale in production, technology platforms aren’t always fully mature, and driving real impact from data often requires fundamental changes to the way people work across a range of disciplines and functions.

For GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), a data strategy grounded in near-term priorities and value creation has proved key in avoiding such issues, enabling the pharmaceutical titan to establish the processes and technical foundation necessary to embrace bolder transformational moves aimed at competitive advantage. The strategy, launched in 2018 and dubbed Value Strikes, began bearing fruit in 2019 with a series of advanced analytics use cases, earning GSK a CIO 100 Award in IT Excellence.

“The Value Strikes program was a way to accelerate our enterprise data and analytics ambition,” says Jen Baxter, senior vice president of tech strategy and performance at GSK. “Each use case, termed ‘value strike,’ leveraged our existing data in order to achieve our strategic priorities while delivering significant near-term P&L or cash value. In parallel, these experiences helped build up our people and technology capabilities across the organization.”

Baxter says the program successfully demonstrated how GSK could use a structured approach to defining opportunities for AI, incubating solutions, and scaling them effectively.

“We are now scaling a few select cases to embedding and systematizing data and analytics across our operational activities,” Baxter says. “This is easier said than done, but we are making great progress and it’s awesome seeing teams and individuals learning.”

One of the company’s most successful ‘value strikes’ involved inventory. GSK’s supply chain analytics team deployed a new set of digital and analytics tools focused on inventory reduction opportunities across the company’s supply chain. The new suite of tools included a digital value stream map, safety stock optimizer, inventory corridor report, and planning cockpit.

“The pharmaceutical supply chain — from raw ingredients to customer — is incredibly complex,” says Shankar Jegasothy, director of supply chain analytics at GSK. “We wanted to use our data to create better visibility of our end-to-end supply chain, and then use predictive and prescriptive analytics to guide decisions around inventory and planning. The program aimed to deliver value through successive waves of increasing complexity, from policy adherence to full-scale supply chain design optimization.”

GSK scored further analytics success in payables, where it designed new analytics tools aimed at improving compliance of invoices and purchase orders to agreed terms and at renegotiating contracts to align terms to best practice in local markets and industries.

The company completed proofs of concepts and incubation of both the inventory and payables value strikes within months and have begun scaling them across the business.

“Our approach was to solve some of our most pressing business challenges leveraging data and analytics, not to develop algorithms and technology in isolation,” Baxter says. “We selected each value strike by working with our executive team to identify key business questions that could potentially be answered through advanced analytics.