Overview

Founded in 1668, Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany is one of the world's oldest and most globally distributed science and technology companies, with more than 62,000 employees across 65 countries and €21.1 billion in sales in 2025. The company operates across life science, healthcare and electronics – with a scope, complexity, and cross-sector data needs that make enterprise data governance not just a technical challenge, but an organizational imperative.

Supernova Award Category

Data to Decisions

The Problem

With data spanning three business sectors and 65 countries, accumulated over decades of global operations, Merck faced a critical barrier: this data was fragmented across siloed systems, inconsistently documented, and largely inaccessible to the teams who needed it most. Employees across finance, R&D, and commercial operations struggled to identify trusted data sources, understand ownership, and apply consistent definitions across business units – ultimately slowing AI development, analytics insights, and critical business reporting. Without a unified governance framework in place, teams had no reliable way to find, trust, or build on data that existed elsewhere in the organization, and data literacy across the enterprise remained severely limited.

The Solution

Merck's response was a companywide Group Data & AI Strategy built around three pillars: technology, ways of working, and people. At its core was UPTIMIZE Data Central, built on the Actian Data Intelligence Platform, which was deployed as Merck's global metadata repository to solve its data discovery and governance challenges at an enterprise scale. Actian was selected for its intuitive user interface and seamless integration with Merck's existing technology stack – including Snowflake, SAP, and Palantir Foundry – and rolled out through a domain-based activation model that embedded dedicated stewardship roles across business units to drive widespread employee adoption and increase data literacy.

The results

After deploying UPTIMIZE Data Central, Merck established a single, searchable metadata repository accessible to employees across all business functions globally – from data scientists and architects to finance analysts and R&D teams. Data discovery became fully self-service, with clear stewardship roles, defined data quality metrics, and structured workflows supporting day-to-day operations. The result was a trusted, documented, and governed data foundation that directly accelerated Merck's AI and analytics programs; ultimately shifting data governance from a compliance obligation to an embedded organizational practice across its global enterprise.

Metrics

1,000 data products implemented and documented within UPTIMIZE Data Central 30,000 datasets connected from critical sources including Snowflake and SAP 13,000+ Merck employees actively using the platform across global divisions

The Technology

UPTIMIZE Data Central, built on the Actian Data Intelligence Platform, serves as Merck's global metadata repository and the central hub connecting its broader data & analytics ecosystem to its enterprise IT landscape. The platform supports three core user groups: 1) Data Consumers searching and accessing data across the organization; 2) Data Stewards collaborating on governance operations; and 3) Data Architects tracing data flows across system boundaries. UPTIMIZE integrates with Merck's full analytics stack, including AWS, Snowflake, Palantir Foundry, SAP, and proprietary AI/ML services. It’s designed to be fully self-service, secure, and compliant by default. Self-serve training is built directly into the platform, reflecting Merck's belief that data governance is as much a “people” challenge as a technology one.

Disruptive Factor

Implementing a global metadata catalog across a 62,000-person multi-sector organization demanded more than new technology; it required a full-scale organizational change program that was built around its people and processes and leveraged incremental momentum as it advanced. Rather than attempting a single global rollout, Merck adopted a domain-based activation model with a focus on onboarding data and systems incrementally as readiness and momentum were established within each business unit. Local data ambassadors, structured stewardship roles, and integrated training to upskill ensured adoption was built from the ground up rather than mandated from the top down. The result is a repeatable and scalable blueprint for how large, data-rich global organizations can achieve federated data governance without sacrificing rigor or employee trust.

Shining Moment

What sets this transformation apart is the philosophy behind how they chose to deploy the technology. From the beginning, Merck recognized that a data catalog is only as valuable as the people willing to use it and that waiting until every dataset across every business unit was documented before launching would defeat the purpose entirely. Taking the path less chosen, Merck built momentum domain by domain, prioritizing their organizational readiness and employee enablement over reach on day one. The Actian Data Intelligence Platform was selected for its intuitive, user-friendly interface – a deliberate choice rooted in the belief that adoption, not implementation, is the true measure of success. The result is a governance program where employees across functions have embraced rather than endured.