Shire Leverages Master Data Management for Better Customer Centricity

REVIEWER: Jennifer Dunn, business systems manager for Shire.

BACKGROUND: Shire’s strategic goal is to become the leading specialty biopharmaceutical company that focuses on meeting the needs of the specialist physician. Shire focuses its business on attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder, human genetic therapies, gastrointestinal and renal diseases. Shire believes that a carefully selected portfolio of products with a strategically aligned and relatively small-scale sales force will deliver strong results.

PLATFORMS: Windows 2003 Enterprise Server, Oracle 10g.

PROBLEM SOLVED: Due to increased competition, government regulations and corporate consolidation within the life sciences industry, Shire wanted to optimize the use of customer and customer-related information such as product, contract and organization data, which will ultimately provide the company’s lines of business with a critical and accurate 360-degree view of customers. Equally important was the need to have this unified customer information available across departments and groups within Shire. Each of our customers needed to have a single identifier to ensure that these different groups within Shire were talking about the same customers. Eventually, Shire will be able to use this consolidated view to see all the touchpoints with a customer across the company.

PRODUCT FUNCTIONALITY: Siperian MDM Hub allowed us to bring different sources of customer data together into a singular view. It also enabled us to leverage our existing investment in Trillium’s data quality solution. Siperian’s tight integration with Trillium allowed us to properly cleanse the data and eliminate duplication of customers and addresses. Finally, through the Siperian solution, Shire was able to assign a single ID to each customer, which established a solid data foundation that is now used across sales and marketing. This not only helps us ensure compliance, but it also supports our customer growth and retention efforts as well as improves our corporate-wide decision-making.

STRENGTHS: The ability to eliminate duplicates with the Siperian match/merge rules was an advantage to Shire. Siperian MDM Hub allows these match/merge rules to be configured with different levels of trust with different sources. We are able to change these trust values as the business changes in order to get the most accurate, real-time information we have about a customer into the hands of the sales representatives. With Siperian MDM Hub, we can ensure compliance with government regulations such as the FDA U.S. Prescription Drug Marketing Act (PDMA) that requires pharmaceutical companies to track drug samples provided to physicians and to track the actual marketing spend on a physician.

WEAKNESSES: The administration of the single view of the customer within Siperian must be augmented with reports outside of the system. These reports display exceptions from the processing of data that must be handled.

SELECTION CRITERIA: Shire selected Siperian over other products for a number of reasons, but primarily because of the extensive flexibility of configuring the match/merge rules. We also chose them because their solution enabled us to integrate directly with existing investments such as Siebel, our sales force automation (SFA) tool.

DELIVERABLES: Siperian produces consolidated information for a customer with a single ID that is sent via a nightly interface to our SFA system. This ensures that our reps are getting the best information we have at the time about our customers, which in turn enables them to provide better decision-making.

VENDOR SUPPORT: Siperian’s support during the implementation was very good. Shire had one full-time Siperian consultant to assist us with the configuration of the match/merge rules and the initial data load. We also had an additional business analyst to assist us to define these rules. After the implementation, Siperian was readily available to answer any questions that we had and were quickly able to do so. They were also available to assist with the upgrade to SP2.

DOCUMENTATION: Siperian’s documentation could be more complete. When we did the upgrade to SP2, we relied solely on the documentation provided. However, we ended up having to call support and get assistance and found it was not as complete as it could have been.

Siperian MDM Hub
Siperian Inc.
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San Mateo, CA 94404
(650) 571-2400
www.siperian.com