Overview

Thermo Fisher Scientific is on a mission to make the world healthier, cleaner, and safer for all who inhabit it. As the world leader in serving science, they live out this mission by helping cancer patients live longer through gene therapies, creating products that help scientists develop new drugs, and even returning hope to the city of Flint, Michigan by donating a community water-testing machine. The company’s global team delivers a variety of innovative technologies, purchasing convenience, and pharmaceutical services through its industry-leading brands, including Thermo Scientific, Applied Biosystems, Invitrogen, Fisher Scientific, Unity Lab Services, Patheon, and PPD.

Supernova Award Category

Data to Decisions

The Problem

Before implementing Alation’s Data Intelligence Platform, each division at Thermo Fisher operated as a separate entity that hindered its ability to deliver the “One Thermo Fisher” experience. With different data definitions and data quality rules across divisions, extracting enterprise value from division-based data became difficult.

Additionally, data variation became the enemy of execution, with a lack of enterprise-level standards, ownership, and trust leading to delays, duplicative work, inefficient practices, lowered ROI, and decision-making with little confidence.

The Solution

Thermo Fisher needed enterprise-level data governance to address the growing complexity of its data environment and aggregate vast data sets across the organization rather than relying on siloed, fragmented data. To address these data silos, Thermo Fisher created a common data language across the enterprise with Alation’s Data Intelligence Platform. The platform provided one central place to find, understand, and govern data while enabling data discoverability, ensuring trust, and standardizing operations.

The results

Alation improved data governance for Thermo Fisher in 3 ways:

• Data became discoverable: Alation’s Data Intelligence Platform spurs searchability and discoverability with data sources, tables, and schemas, building a foundation for empowering 125K+ Thermo Fisher employees to quickly and easily locate and access the data they need from one central place. Additionally, Alation’s Data Intelligence Platform offers the best user interface on the market, allowing Thermo Fisher to self-service without contacting its IT team whenever help is needed. 
• Data became recognizable: Alation’s Data Intelligence Platform enables Thermo Fisher to establish a shared language, comprehensive glossaries, precise definitions, well-defined rules, and accountable owners, ensuring consistent understanding and management of data across the organization.
• Data became compliant: Alation’s Data Intelligence Platform provides robust measures for handling and tagging sensitive data while facilitating adherence to product regulations, allowing Thermo Fisher to maintain data privacy, security, and PII regulatory compliance.

Alation provided Thermo Fisher with dedicated support during and after implementation, including professional services, technical account managers, a community of experts, and resources like how-to videos and custom web pages. As a result, onboarding new users became fast and seamless, data adoption scaled across the enterprise, and employees were aligned with data-driven practices.

Metrics

After implementing Alation’s Data Intelligence Platform, Thermo Fisher established a common data language across 5 divisions in 18 sites, enabling them to standardize operations and scale productivity. Thermo Fisher added over 300 definitions, KPIs, data quality rules, data stewards, and other SME information into Alation, adding to the common data language established within the platform. And to further strengthen its data governance initiative, Thermo Fisher created onboarding resources and a world-class ‘Getting Started’ site to familiarize new employees with Alation. 

Other positive business outcomes fueled by a powerful data governance program include reducing the New Product Introduction (NPI) cycle time by half, from 12 weeks to 6 weeks for new product launches. Consequently, several of the divisions at Thermo Fisher moved from managing around 75,000 products to managing more than 1 million products without a commensurate increase in staffing.

The Technology

Alation’s Data Intelligence Platform helped Thermo Fisher eliminate silos and deliver governed data to the enterprise with its federated approach. Alation is designed so everyone can easily find, understand, and trust the data they need. The platform enables data governance as a collaborative endeavor enriched by including a broad range of users. For example, teams nearest the data can create their own business glossaries. As a result, employees can collaborate using trusted, governed data.

Disruptive Factor

Revamping the company’s internal data structure with Alation – taking it from something complex and fragmented to unified and streamlined – allowed Thermo Fisher to extract enterprise value from its division-based data. A common enterprise-level data language and internal governance processes are foundational to Thermo Fisher achieving many of its business objectives. Further, with Alation, Thermo Fisher unlocked the potential of its data to make decisions with confidence.

Shining Moment

Alation created harmony across the enterprise, laying the foundation for employees to quickly search and discover data across multiple divisions to make critical business decisions. The organization also brought functions like supply chain and procurement to the enterprise level through governance, ensuring data governance occurs across the entire org. Thermo Fisher looks to incorporate data quality integration into Alation so that users can determine data quality and action using trusted data.