Client Challenge
The global challenge of pharmaceutical development is driving market consolidation. The client, a global pharmaceutical company, required help with leading the consolidation of global service management, following their decision to close their UK development business.
The company was faced with a significant revenue challenge as its branded products patent period ended.
The decision was taken to focus development activities in their largest markets – the US and Japan. As a result, UK IT service covering infrastructure, apps and service management, supporting a global user community, needed to be transitioned to US.
Additionally, significant unrelated change was being carried out in US service delivery model, including new third-party service desk provider.
Lastly, the client identified a small number of business roles that would need to be retained in the UK.
Approach
Coeus conducted a full current state review to fully understand the scope and responsibilities of the UK IT service.
This focussed on understanding the applications and associated data, that were hosted in the UK and identifying specific migration plans across the estate.
The programme also needed to identify which global support processes were operated from the UK, and which core responsibilities would need to be transitioned to the US.
It also required reviewing and agreeing transition actions for in-flight IT projects and assessing options for re-use of IT infrastructure at other Client sites (e.g. servers, telepresence suite).
Coeus also helped the client with reviewing IT contracts and agreeing novation or termination approach with vendors and identifying and managing dependencies across IT, Facilities, Contracts, HR and Finance work streams.
The team established a new global service desk for the critical global application in US. This included transitioning UK operations. We migrated business data to US – including dealing with US / EU data privacy requirements.
Within the UK operation we novated or terminated IT contracts and decommissioned IT infrastructure. We reviewed IT policies and operating procedures to remove and re-assign UK responsibilities and decommissioned 18-seat telepresence suite for re-use in the US
We also supported business-wide records management effort to ensure that electronic records were cleansed in line with policy prior to migration.
Results
Coeus ensured that the UK development business transitioned to the US and closed on time and budget.
We mitigated the business risk from closing the UK global support operation and reused critical business assets. All this was against a compliant data migration, ensuring business continuity.
