Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer has long used a variety of business intelligence and analytics tools to identify trends in drug use with the goal of projecting future needs more efficiently. Now it is expanding its BI/BA strategy to include additional data categories and to make the tools more accessible to a greater range of users, reports Samuel Greengard at Baseline magazine. 

Pfizer uses BI and BA technologies from IBM, SAP, SAS and TIBCO for multiple purposes, from reporting to developing predictive models. The company is now adding data from doctors and insurers, as wells as demographics information, into the mix, with the hope of gaining deeper insight into different customer segments. Currently, about 75,000 employees are using BI tools, and the system is slated to continue growing.

"The nature of business is changing, and it's important to understand things at a very granular level," said Kelly Shen, BI lead for biopharmaceuticals at Pfizer. "We want to gain a competitive advantage by knowing exactly what's driving performance and revenue."

To make business intelligence more user-friendly, Pfizer has deployed an "Intelligence Storefront" system, with sophisticated analytics capabilities and dashboards that are customized for different employee segments, including marketing professionals, district managers and unit presidents. In addition to enabling faster, fact-based decision-making, the system aims to assist with collaboration and regulatory compliance.

For more:
- see Samuel Greengard's article at Baseline

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