Driving Efficiency and Automation in Pharma with ServiceNow & xtype

The pharmaceutical industry faces immense pressure to innovate while controlling costs. Companies seek digital transformation to improve agility, boost operational efficiency, and improve patient outcomes. ServiceNow provides a platform to help pharma organizations on their digital journey. 

Driving Pharmaceutical Efficiency

Pharma companies implement ServiceNow to help drive automation and process efficiency across the business. The goals are to reduce operating costs, accelerate drug development, and get drugs to market faster. 

Pharmaceutical companies can use ServiceNow to consolidate legacy systems onto a single platform. This consolidation provided a "single source of truth" for information across the company. Employees now have self-service access to data through user-friendly interfaces on any device.

Workflow Automation

Automating repetitive tasks is also a key focus. ServiceNow workflows can standardize processes for managing drug trials, contracting, facilities, and other areas. Employees can request services and track progress through ServiceNow. Approvals, notifications, and handoffs happen automatically based on predefined rules. Workflow automation and orchestration free highly skilled staff to focus on higher-value work rather than repetitive work.

The Integration Hub

ServiceNow also enhances collaboration and knowledge sharing. ServiceNow can be a central repository for documents, procedures, and training materials. Employees can easily find resources, reducing duplicate efforts. The Now platform links related information so teams get context for better decisions.

The Now platform integrates smoothly with existing systems, making uniting siloed technologies and data sources easier. Pharma companies can design automated workflows tailored to their specific needs across virtually any process or department.

For Example

For example, clinical trials are extremely document-intensive. ServiceNow can centralize documents and connect them to relevant users, tasks, and milestones. Teams save time searching for information and can collaborate more efficiently. Automated notifications and reminders keep trials moving forward.

In HR, ServiceNow can automate onboarding and offboarding processes. New employees get a smooth introduction, automatically scheduling all required equipment, access, and training. Access can be revoked when someone leaves, and systems are de-provisioned according to policy.

Facilities teams can track assets, schedule preventive maintenance, and process work orders in ServiceNow. IT can manage services, assets, changes, and incidents from a single intuitive portal. 

Accelerating ServiceNow Services Delivery

The benefits pharmaceutical companies look to enjoy from the Now platform depend on the speed at which ServiceNow teams can deliver the features and apps that will automate workflows and processes. The silent inhibitor to delivery velocity and frequency is inconsistencies between your ServiceNow instances. 

Differences between instances cause errors and warnings that must be investigated, troubleshooted, and resolved. This effort causes delays and acts as a drag on delivery velocity and frequency. xtype provides native ServiceNow products designed to address environment inconsistency and to provide quick and easy packaging/bundling of instance payloads so they can be automatically migrated downstream.

Controlled Synchronization

ServiceNow update sets allow moving changes between instances; however, these update sets may be running different family release versions and features. These differences mean developers build features destined to fail downstream without preemptively knowing this beforehand. 

xtype provides bidirectional synchronization of your updates, which nearly eliminates migration errors because (1) updates are synchronized before errors form and (2) they are found during new development, allowing developers to fix them in context.

Zero Touch Deployment

It is typical for ServiceNow teams to hold multiple-day war room meetings in which they compile a lengthy spreadsheet where every update set, app, plugin, plugin activation, XML, records, etc., are enumerated and ordered. This spreadsheet is then thrown over the wall to the environment team responsible for deploying the listed payload to the next instance.

Since xtype already knows what asset is where it provides a mechanism to efficiently build and order your release payload via a pick-n-click and drag-n-drop interface. xtype packages are named and versioned for easy tracking and can be deployed by click, schedule, or change request ticket. xtype packages can be deployed automatically downstream as well as upstream. No more spreadsheets. No more time wasted building error-prone spreadsheets.

Conclusion

Automating repetitive tasks allows employees to focus on delivering high-value outcomes. The Now platform can positively impact pharma revenues while reducing costs and risks. With the right strategy and tools like xtype, pharmaceutical organizations can drive efficiency, innovation, and growth on the Now platform faster.