Merck Animal Health: A Platform For Future Success

Partnering with the NNIT Migration Powerhouse team - formerly known as Valiance - Merck Animal Health embarked on a program to establish a state-of-the-art regulatory database that would contain all Merck Animal Health’s regulatory information on pharmaceutical and biological products.

This customer case describes how a strategic approach to data migration and Merck Animal Health leadership helped to establish a platform for future success.

Merck Animal Health’s ‘Alexx’ RIM system – History in the making?

Named after the famous Great Library of Alexandria – regarded as the ancient world’s capital for knowledge and learning, Merck Animal Health (MSD outside the United States and Canada) clearly hold lofty ambitions for Alexx – a very modern global vault for Regulatory Information Management based on Veeva’s RIM suite.

Migration Methodology

Migration to Alexx would ultimately require the consolidation of regulatory data from 3 distinct sources and the configuration of 350+ business rules to enhance, enrich & align Merck Animal Health’s product portfolio information. NNIT Migration Powerhouse’s Insight Methodology provided the project team with a reference framework to carefully plan and manage the migration. From initiation to requirements analysis, to migration rule configuration, test management, and cutover planning, the proven methodology allowed the team to navigate the complexities of an enterprise-scale data migration.

TRUseries software – 100% data verification

TRUseries has become the de facto industry standard in migration software to support life science companies as they migrate to new unified platforms. Specialist migration teams use the software to configure extract routines, build transformation rules and implement migration logic to migrate data to the target system in a controlled and consistent manner. With multiple Merck sources and multiple test cycles to manage the complexity of RIM data, the software also allows migration and verification to be orchestrated in a predictable manner. Uniquely, TRUcompare provides an automated test capability to verify 100% of the migrated data.

Model Partnership

Migration projects are not without pitfalls and risk. The intricacies of registration data required to support a global portfolio, coupled with the extra complexity of animal health product characteristics, created many challenges. The Merck Animal Health migration team of leaders and subject matter experts and the NNIT Migration Powerhouse team of data analysts and specialists worked as a unit to demonstrate completeness, accuracy, and consistency of data. Although taking longer than planned, quality goals were exceeded, and the true collaboration demonstrated on this project has been promoted as best practice for similar projects within Merck Animal Health.

Data Migration as a cornerstone for digital transformation

Merck Animal Health’s Paul Verhallen, Director Global Regulatory Affairs, anticipates significant potential in Veeva’s RIM platform to share regulatory data globally, harmonize business processes and establish a platform for future regulatory and business change:

Data Migration as a call to quality

Merck Animal Health’s Aline Kersten–Bloemendal, Assoc. Dir. Global Regulatory Affairs Operations, emphasized the need for data quality above all other considerations during the migration process:

"As the Merck Animal Health business grew and developed, new ways to manage and capture regulatory data were often required – sometimes quickly and for specific portfolios, using different systems. This introduced data risk. Our steering committee helped to guide the data migration team to ensure a rock-solid quality foundation for future growth. We are delighted to report that successful completion of the data migration project also marked the completion of a number of quality-led initiatives."

Data Migration as an accelerator for best practice data management

Merck Animal Health’s Geert Jilesen, Assoc. Director Regulatory IT, looks forward to easier days managing Global Regulatory Affairs data:

“Data migration projects are often a litmus test for existing data management practices. Equally, they can be considered an accelerator to help establish best practices. Consolidation of disparate information from multiple sources, detailed verifications at each step, and multiple automated data transformations have enabled an overnight leap forward in data trustworthiness within our Global Regulatory Affairs group”.

The NNIT Migration Powerhouse team is delighted to have supported this successful initiative.