A Customer Perspective on the Vault RIM Object Model
Rich Fredericks, Associate Director, Regulatory Systems and Information Management

The Veeva Vault Object Model enables companies to manage raw data, descriptive data such as document or object attributes, and their relationships.

We asked a seasoned Vault admin to talk about the Vault RIM object model and how it has helped their organization manage regulatory activities and information.

I’m a big fan of the Veeva Object Model, especially in Vault RIM. I think it’s very helpful to have an industry-specific layout for the objects and fields. End users simply hop in, even if they’ve never really seen the Veeva RIM before, they totally understand how hierarchy is set up. They understand the product application submissions definitions, so we don’t have to kind of really introduce a whole new nomenclature with them. They just kind of plug in and go. It saved me a lot of time with training.

One way we use the Object Model is to do a lot of tracking on either commitments or submissions. And the way the objects are set up is extremely valuable because we can fold them up into one another. You can set up a customized field at one level, say the product, and have it cascade down through some of the other objects. So automatically populate a person’s name, say the regulatory affairs lead, at the product level it’ll automatically trickle down into say the application and the submission. It’s very valuable the way that the data kind of loops around itself. But there’s usually one central spot to control it.

We’ve evolved some of the objects in adding more fields to them just to bring more valuable data when we pull reports or do kind of filters and searches. We’ve also added a number of new objects that also assist within regulatory affairs and some of the functional areas under the R&D umbrella.

If a company was thinking about implementing Vault RIM, one thing they should probably understand about the Object Model is that it’s pretty tailored to the industry as is. So they could almost dive right in and not have to do any heavy lifting up front. You could hop in to Veeva RIM at the product level and basically learn everything about that asset just from a couple quick clicks. You could pull some reports, some pretty heavy metrics depending on how you have the objects configured.

To learn more about the benefits of a truly unified RIM solution, read our white paper.