Best Practices for Bringing Acquired Companies into a Veeva Environment

Mergers and acquisitions are a well-established strategy for life sciences companies that want to realign their product portfolios. But achieving the desired business outcomes isn’t easy. Success requires effectively integrating people, processes, and technologies on both sides of the equation.

At the 2022 Veeva R&D and Quality Summit, AbbVie and Gilead Sciences shared how they incorporated multiple acquisitions into their technology landscape, including the Veeva Development Cloud. In a fireside chat, the customers discussed their approaches to aligning business and technology strategies, migrating information between Vaults, and onboarding incoming users.

Gilead Adds Acquired Companies to Vault Quality

Amit Chachra, Gilead’s senior IT director for enterprise platforms, described his team’s role in the acquisition of Kite Pharma and Immunomedics while underscoring the importance of flexibility when merging two organizations. Gilead was in the middle of implementing Vault Quality when the Kite deal closed. Amit’s team pivoted quickly to take advantage of the situation in front of them, choosing to go live with Kite as the first use case. The move accelerated Kite’s integration into Gilead and built momentum for the global launch of Vault Quality.

Amit’s advice to attendees included these best practices:

• Focus on the business objectives of the acquisition. The north star for Amit’s team was to incorporate the acquired therapies into Gilead’s ecosystem as quickly as possible while taking into account the new requirements.
• Set a clear technology strategy. Gilead’s decision to standardize on Veeva enabled productive, forward-looking discussions about legacy systems and product roadmaps.
• Harmonize business processes globally. Having standard quality processes in place made it easier to align the acquired operations as well as the supporting technology strategy.
• Collaborate with the business on migration timing. The team considered the impact on critical business activities and the availability of stakeholders to help with the migration.
• Reduce the disruption of cutover. In addition to building in buffer time, the team determined which Veeva capabilities—like accessing documents—could be left on during the transition.

AbbVie Integrates Allergan’s Clinical Operations

Bryan Feldman, senior director of business technology solutions, talked about AbbVie’s 2020 acquisition of Allergan, one of the top ten pharma deals of all time. Because both clinical organizations used Veeva, Bryan’s team was able to treat the integration as a “lift and shift.” In order to minimize disruption to study teams during working hours, AbbVie scheduled a series of cutovers from Friday to Sunday and repeated that process four times over a 12 week period to migrate all trials in Vault Clinical.

Bryan emphasized these critical success factors:

• Establish clear parameters for prioritization and decision-making. From the outset, the project team had a mandate that AbbVie technologies and processes were the way of the future.
• Assign dedicated, full-time resources to the project. AbbVie put other initiatives on hold so that the right people could focus solely on the integration of Allergan.
• Be thoughtful and thorough when preparing for migration. The team devoted six months to cleaning and mapping data in the Allergan system and rationalized 673 document types.
• Minimize disruption to clinical trials. Technology and business teams broke Allergan’s study portfolio into four waves, then migrated 25 studies at a time over 12 weeks.
• Double down on post-cutover support. AbbVie provided white glove support following go-live with proactive check-ins, team chats, and super users available on call.

Like Gilead, AbbVie leveraged the acquisition to augment an ongoing Veeva project. At the time of the purchase, AbbVie had just started implementing Vault Study Startup, which Allergan already used. As a result, AbbVie paused its internal rollout, migrated the Allergan team and technology into the AbbVie footprint, and utilized Allergan’s experience to streamline and enhance the implementation.

To learn more about how biopharma organizations are scaling their operations, read this case study on GSK’s approach to governance and usability.