San Jose, CA — April 29, 2003 — Pharmaceuticals giant AstraZeneca has signed a global contract with software provider Business Objects to extend its business intelligence solutions across the company to support enterprise performance management.
AstraZeneca, which spends more than $10 million every business day in research and development, employs 55,000-plus people and has sales in more than 100 countries. The company has healthcare sales in excess of $17.8 billion.
With this new contract, AstraZeneca has purchased the end-to-end product line from the solution provider, including BusinessObjects, WebIntelligence, Data Integrator and Application Foundation.
Business Objects said that its solutions will help AstraZeneca track, understand and manage key business metrics in order to improve operational efficiency, cut costs and increase competitive advantage. AstraZeneca is anticipating a return on this latest investment in Business Objects business intelligence solutions within the next 18 months.
"With best-of-breed technology from data integration to the business intelligence front-end, Business Objects provides AstraZeneca with one solution to access and deliver key data to all corporate decision makers, improving their ability to manage business performance," said Steve Atkinson, enterprise software manager for AstraZeneca. "This integrated and dynamic view of our business will help us to achieve operational excellence and maintain leadership in a competitive industry."
More than 5,000 research and development (R&D) staff at AstraZeneca already use the provider's BI solutions to access, analyze and share research and development project information, including new product development and clinical trials across the company's seven global "centers of excellence." This has helped AstraZeneca to accelerate the time to market for new products, according to the solution provider.
The new agreement with Business Objects allows AstraZeneca to broaden the use of the provider's business intelligence solutions across its 55,000 employees worldwide.
AstraZeneca will expand its use of BusinessObjects, the integrated query, reporting and analysis solution for the enterprise, and WebIntelligence, the Web-based BI solution, to gather and monitor information across core business operations including R&D, manufacturing, finance and marketing. AstraZeneca will also implement Data Integrator, a real-time and batch integration tool, to simplify and accelerate data access, integration and delivery across the company.
In addition, AstraZeneca has purchased Application Foundation, an analytic framework for developing and deploying analytic applications. Using Application Foundation, AstraZeneca can build management dashboards with at-a-glance displays that show the status of key performance indicators across the organization, according to Business Objects.
"In a fast changing economy, where businesses need greater visibility across all enterprise functions, AstraZeneca is using business intelligence to proactively monitor information to ensure the entire organization achieves optimum performance," said John Olsen, chief operating officer at Business Objects.
