Clients

HP Prescribes Data Warehousing Solution for Bristol-Myers Squibb
Commentary by Kathy Serfin, BMS Director of Data Warehouse Design and Development

Challenges:
•	Implement a single source of integrated quality, enterprise, and departmental information for true iterative decision support
•	House 800 million facts that integrate with internal monthly data
•	Deliver a tremendous amount of data in a matter of days without affecting performance or availability
Solution:
•	BMS Sales and Marketing data warehouse
•	Extract, transform, and load (ETL) process—the heart of the warehouse—uses over two terabytes and provides a single source for decision making
•	HP 9000 V2500, the dedicated ETL server, is utilized and highly parallelized processing is used for maximum performance
Results:
•	Data warehouse saves a great deal of money each month in analytical costs, data quality improvements, data delivery times, reductions in end-user training, and improved decision making
•	Success of sales and marketing data warehouse influenced creation of other data warehouses within the organization

Every day, millions of men and women around the world rely on medication to control or prevent disease. And while many consumers may not recognize the brands or even care who manufactures the drugs, it’s a different story for the pharmaceutical companies.

With enormous sums of money at stake, drug companies have a vested interest in making sure you, your pharmacist, your doctor, and your insurance provider ask for their products by name. As a result, pharmaceutical companies have become keepers of huge repositories of data: sales and marketing information, physician data, research reports, and managed care statistics.

However, managing and effectively using this volume and diversity of information can be challenging. When Bristol-Myers Squibb’s (BMS) Sales and Marketing division decided to internalize its performance reporting, it turned to trusted partner Hewlett-Packard Company for a proven data warehouse solution.

A Pharmaceutical Leader

BMS is a diversified global health and personal care company whose mission is to extend and enhance human life. Its medicines Pravachol, TAXOL®, and Glucophage head the list of 64 product lines in BMS’s key businesses that each has annual global sales of more than $50 million.

Driving the Need for a Data Warehouse

In 1994, market changes and past mergers created new opportunities for BMS to study how it utilized information and to develop a comprehensive information strategy to sustain its competitive position in the marketplace.

"Our business was changing," explained Kathy Serfin, Director of Data Warehouse Design for BMS. "As a result, the data that was available was much richer and voluminous. One of the drivers in implementing the data warehouse was that we needed to better use that data. At the time, our data was being outsourced. One of the main problems with outsourcing was that the data wasn’t timely. It provided isolated information and it was static—we couldn’t explore the data further. There were questions we’d never been able to answer before and the following was one of the strategic imperatives of the project—to build an internal data warehouse foundation that we could grow on."

Meeting the Challenge

Bristol-Myers Squibb began by creating a data warehouse organization and researching the differences in data warehousing. From there, the group evaluated and selected hardware and software vendors—choosing HP for its performance and scalability of its products. Additionally, the company selected an Oracle database (starting with version 7, now at 8.05) and the HP-UX operating system (beginning with version 9.04, today upgraded to 11.0) as well as HP OpenView MeasureWare and IT Operations for systems management.

"Our first challenge was to get the external data—800 million facts—house it internally and make it available," said Corinne Julian, BMS Associate Director of Architecture. "Then over the years, we could work on integrating this external data with our in-house data. We initially started with only performance data. One of the key items was to integrate this purchased performance information with our internal investment and operational data."

Additionally, BMS needed its data warehouse’s extract, transform, and load (ETL) process to deliver a tremendous amount of data in a matter of days, with minimum to no downtime—and without affecting client query performance.

In the first critical year of BMS’ data warehouse, HP Consulting helped with implementation, as well as with best practices. "They taught us some of the best practices that we had not learned theoretically," said Serfin. "We had other companies come in and help, but from an outside professional services point of view, HP was the only company that really provided any assistance."

HP’s Data Warehousing Rx

For BMS’ data warehouse, scalability was an important factor, as evidenced by the company’s progression from one HP 9000 T500 Enterprise Server in 1995, to its current home on the HP 9000 V2500s. "Over the last three years we have instituted a major effort to re-architect the infrastructure every year," noted Julian. "We began our production and development—everything—on that one HP 9000 T500 server. Then over the years, we grew to a total size of over six terabytes spanning several HP servers. The transform process and database server expanded to two HP 9000 T500s, then two HP 9000 T520s, and now we have two HP 9000 V2500s connected to EMC disk arrays."

She continued, "Throughout the process, as we needed various front end data marts, we added servers, starting with the HP 9000 K460s, then the HP 9000 K580s, and now, we have a mixture of HP 9000 K580s and HP 9000 N4000 servers."

Increasing Data Delivery

As a result of BMS’s continual review and re-architecture, the company has been able to increase the speed of data delivery to its 400 direct users and over 6,000 total users more than six full weeks. "It used to take us from six to eight weeks to take the feeds from our external vendors and integrate them with the internal information," said Serfin. "That process is now down to two weeks. Even more impressive, we’ve been able to make technology changes and improvements at the same time we’ve been able to increase delivery speed—all with no downtime!"

Providing Consistent and Consolidated Information

To better serve its business clients, in 1998, BMS added a fully staffed Information Center to its data warehousing capabilities. "We created it so that business clients could come to the Information Center with requests for information rather than to a data mart with a business intelligence tool attached," explained Serfin. "More important, the Information Center helped to enable a difficult cultural change. As with many other companies, BMS people were not used to going directly to their PC’s for information. The staff of the Information Center has assisted in changing this by guiding and training employees while they accomplish their tasks."

The BMS team also credits its data warehouse’s Information Center with the ability to provide more consistent answers. "In addition to the requirement that the data be timely, the data that BMS provided was not consistent with the data provided by vendors. This was due to different business rules being applied to the various applications," explained Hugh Sloan, Associate Director of Data Warehouse.

"And this was the point where we leapt from maybe 300 users a year to 6,000," adds Randy Sepcic, Associate Director, U.S. Medicines, Access and Delivery Systems. "Top management was looking for a way of communicating from top to bottom within an organization with information that is consistent and consolidated. The data warehouse became the heart of all the information for those communications, because everybody trusted it would be the same upward and downward and across."

The Future of Data Warehousing

While BMS’ sales and marketing data warehouse is credited with saving a great deal of money each month in analytical costs, data quality improvements, delivery times, and improved decision making, it also has created an unexpected benefit: a spawn of other data warehouses within the company.

"Our data warehouse was one of the first major warehouse initiatives that developed a lot of best practices, infrastructure, and foundation for other warehousing initiatives throughout the organization," said Julian. "But we’re not finished with our warehouse yet. In the future, we plan to add Web capabilities, as well as more data, more functionality on the front ends, more visualization through graphics, mapping, and data mining. With continued support from HP, we’ll be able to push forward with our initiatives."

At-a-Glance:
Name: Bristol-Myers Squibb
Headquarters: New York City
Founded: 1887
Employees: 54,000 worldwide
1999 Revenues: More Than $20 billion
Telephone: 212-546-4000
URL: www.bms.com

Main Products:
Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMS) is a leading diversified worldwide health and personal care company whose principal businesses are medicines, beauty care, nutritionals, and medical devices. Its medicines Pravachol, TAXOL®, and Glucophage head the list of 64 product lines in Bristol-Myers Squibb’s key businesses that each has annual global sales of more than $50 million.

Technology Highlights

•	2 HP 9000 V2500 Enterprise Servers
•	10 HP 9000 N4000 and K580 Enterprise Servers
•	EMC Symmetrix disk storage
•	HP-UX 11.0
	Oracle 8.05
•	HP OpenView MeasureWare and IT Operations Modules
•	HP Consulting for implementation services and knowledge sharing practices

Case Study Source: http://www.dw-institute.com/research/display.asp?id=5402