Towards Implementation of Big Data Concepts in a Pharmaceutical Company

Abstract

Nowadays, big data is a widely utilized concept that has been spreading quickly in almost every domain. For pharmaceutical companies, using this concept is a challenging task because of the permanent pressure and business demands created through the legal requirements, research demands and standardization that have to be adopted. These legal and standards’ demands are associated with human healthcare safety and drug control that demands continuous and deep data analysis. Companies update their procedures to the particular laws, standards, market demands and regulations all the time by using contemporary information technology. This paper highlights some important aspects of the experience and change methodology used in one Macedonian pharmaceutical company, which has employed information technology solutions that successfully tackle legal and business pressures when dealing with a large amount of data. We used a holistic view and deliverables analysis methodology to gain top-down insights into the possibilities of big data analytics. Also, structured interviews with the company’s managers were used for information collection and proactive methodology with workshops was used in data integration toward the implementation of big data concepts. The paper emphasizes the information and knowledge used in this domain to improve awareness for the needs of big data analysis to achieve a competitive advantage. The main results are focused on systematizing the whole company’s data, information and knowledge and propose a solution that integrates big data to support managers’ decision-making processes.

Keywords

• big data
• information systems
• unstructured data
• enterprise resource planning systems
• serialization