BMS Shares RIM Transformation at Veeva R&D Summit

Cindy Piccirillo
Group director, global regulatory business capabilities
Bristol-Myers Squibb

“We can’t move at the pace of pharma, we need information instantly. That’s where working on one single platform is the natural solution for us.” Cindy Piccirillo took the stage at Veeva R&D Summit to describe their regulatory transformation program, an initiative to transform their business operations with a global, authoritative source of regulatory information.

BMS as a company is transforming its portfolio, shifting their focus to oncology medicines where the pace of innovation is extreme. For the regulatory team to keep up, they needed to address their disparate legacy systems. “Some technologies were quite aged and no longer of use. The primary system is seventeen years old. The team jokes that it is old enough to drive.”

Phase one of their three-part initiative addressed global submission planning and submission content plans. This was an area with no supporting systems, work was done manually on spreadsheets. This is also an area that plays a key role in getting medicines to patients quickly. When getting executive sign-off on such a major initiative, the business case needed to demonstrate that they would accelerate their submissions and could quantify the benefit of getting to patients faster.

The BMS partnership with Veeva is built around a shared desire for speed. One of the IT leaders at BMS noted the historic difficulties of working with software releases that slip past their original delivery date. Piccirillo noted how Veeva’s firm timeline with known releases makes budgeting and planning so much easier. “The company is becoming accustomed to a faster pace of change and is building a culture of speed. It has been a fantastic partnership – it’s one team, one dream.”

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