Envision Pharma Group and Fivetran: Pioneering faster paths in pharma

“With Fivetran, we help the world’s largest drug providers get their breakthroughs to market faster for better patient outcomes.”
— Joe Zeleski, Data Governance Product Lead at Envision Pharma Group

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Key results:

• Reduced time-to-market for pharmaceutical products through improved data access
• Cut reporting times from weeks to near real-time
• Achieved <1 minute data replication into pre-built dashboards
• Shortened multi-year product development cycle with new architecture, completed in just six months 
• Streamlined manual processes equivalent to the workload of an entire dev & QA team

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Data stack:

• Pipelines: Fivetran
• Destination: Snowflake
• Data source: SQL Server
• Visualization: Power BI

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Envision Pharma Group is at the forefront of life sciences commercialization, helping the world’s leading pharmaceutical companies launch innovative drugs efficiently and effectively. They are experts in managing medical affairs processes, ensuring that every product meets stringent regulatory and commercial standards prior to launch. All of the top 20 pharma companies rely on Envision to manage document creation, funding, grant and clinical trial (IRT) data.

After years of rapid growth, Joe Zeleski, Envision’s Data Governance Product Lead, recognized the need for a robust, streamlined and governed data strategy. The company’s legacy data architecture required manual, custom configuration management, making it difficult to track and analyze key go-to-market metrics for its clients. To resolve this, he’s employed modern technologies like Fivetran and Snowflake to transform Envision’s data movement and processing. 

Zeleski’s strategic leadership has brought order to the tracking and analysis of crucial go-to-market metrics, keeping Envision in the lead for pharmaceutical innovation. With this new architecture, customer application data is centralized, medical affairs workflows are more efficient, and funding and IRT insights are deeper than ever. 

Centralized data streamlines pharma R&D and market readiness

Envision’s products track and manage the data and processes for bringing new drugs and medical breakthroughs to market. Until recently, its highly-governed data architecture involved separate SQL Server instances and configurations for each customer. Over time, data became increasingly siloed, forcing Zeleski’s team to spend time manually building and managing data pipelines.

Zeleski uses Fivetran to move data from the SQL instances and centralize it in Snowflake, allowing his team to build a single, standardized semantic data model to replace dozens of bespoke, per-customer models. He’d built similar systems in the past, but they took years to complete.

“With Fivetran, I built a new architecture in weeks. Without Fivetran, it would have taken months and required an entire dev & QA team.”
— Joe Zeleski, Data Governance Product Lead at Envision Pharma Group

Fivetran’s automated data movement platform not only replicates critical SQL Server data but also omits fields that contain PII and frees Zeleski’s team from routine tasks like integrating daily CSV exports and handling SFTP uploads. With resources now available for high-value projects, the team is developing a new app that enhances the efficiency of medical affairs workflows. This app not only tracks critical events and KPIs but also provides detailed, actionable insights into industry trends. As a white-label solution, it allows users to assess document timelines and delve deep into medical affairs data, breaking it down by therapeutic areas and other key metrics. This enables quicker strategic decisions and improves regulatory compliance, directly impacting time-to-market for new pharmaceuticals.

Envision’s users access data in near real-time, which has been a game changer. “With Fivetran, we replicate data in one minute or less into a pre-built dashboard,” Zeleski says. “Our customers have never seen anything like it before.” Instead of waiting days or weeks for updates on critical publication data, Envision’s new dashboards display exactly what is happening as it’s happening, enabling quicker transitions from clinical trials to market releases.

Predictive analytics and personalized user experiences with AI/ML powered by Fivetran

Envision is recognized as a central hub in global pharmaceutical innovation. It’s at the center of vast volumes of industry data, putting them in the ideal position to aggregate and publish industry benchmarks around business risks and speed to market. Using AI and ML, the business can inform customers about how they’re performing against their competitors or how to optimize workflows to hit key dates for product releases. 

Thanks to Fivetran, Envision Pharma is completely rearchitecting its product and business model. Zeleski is leveraging Fivetran to enable exciting, forward-looking AI/ML projects, like building predictive models that establish global milestones for medical affairs workflows. 

Another significant AI/ML application is what Zeleski terms “future analytics curation.” By harnessing Fivetran to unify diverse data sets, Envision enhances the utility of dashboards for their customers, pinpointing the most relevant views and insights that drive faster market entries. Rather than sifting through numerous standard dashboards, Envision users benefit from custom dashboards tailored to their historical data interactions. These bespoke, dynamically built dashboards highlight the most pertinent metrics and KPIs, streamlining decision-making processes and significantly improving operational efficiency and responsiveness to market demands.

"Using Fivetran, it’s easier than ever to analyze data, allowing us to forecast milestones and monitor outcomes specific to our clients and their needs," Zeleski notes. “We wouldn’t have been able to accomplish this without Fivetran.” 

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