UK Pharmaceutical Company

Initial data challenges and project requirements

1. Verify the alignment of data elements across 7 source data systems in various formats and one master data hub to determine how closely source system data matched that of their MDM solution.
2. Data Profiling and DQ Risk Mitigation were mandatory for all IT projects.
3. Prepare a framework that would make it easy to integrate data quality monitoring into every future data-related project in the company.

Although not an original requirement of the project, in the process of implementing a data quality solution, Ataccama uncovered data quality issues not only in terms of differences between attributes in source systems and their MDM hub, but also within data stored in the company’s MDM hub, including duplicated information, invalid values, and more.

Solution

Ataccama implemented a comprehensive data quality solution to enable company data curators to locate and repair any data issues in their source systems and MDM hub. The solution also allowed business users to view data quality improvements over time and raise awareness of the importance of data quality on all levels. The solution included features such as:

• Summary reports with an overview of the current state of data
• Detailed reports to allow data curators to perform manual corrections in individual source systems
• Export to XLS functionality
• Color-coded XLS templates that could be populated directly from Ataccama data quality tools, and accessed via Ataccama’s user-friendly GUI
• Drill to detail possibilities, including entities (clinical study), parent attributes, and child attributes
• Customizable alerts

As a whole, the company was able to utilize Ataccama data quality tools to cleanse their master data and improve data quality across source systems. Currently, we are working with their data team to explore further use cases for data quality and big data, and have implemented more than 15 projects in total.

Ataccama products used

The pharmaceutical company leverages Ataccama’s complete suite for data quality and governance:

• Data Quality Center (DQC) – a powerful, business rule driven engine for complex data management that enables you to transform, standardize, cleanse, validate, correct, and enrich your data, and prevent incorrect data from entering your systems.

Running on top of the DQC engine, there are two user-friendly applications for data stewards and business users:

• Data Quality Issue Tracker (DQIT) – allows data stewards to resolve various data quality issues that cannot be managed [or fixed/settled] automatically and require their approval or other manual intervention.

• Data Quality Dashboard (DQD) – an application providing a quick, accurate snapshot of the current state of your data, and an excellent tool for tracking data quality trends. For the Telco, DQD was used to analyze source data from multiple streams.

The pharmaceutical company most appreciated the flexibility of Ataccama’s DQ tools, as well as the fact that they are domain-agnostic, allowing the company to apply the tools to clinical studies, chemical compound information, customer data, and more.