Canadian Pharma Company

One of Canada’s leading pharmaceutical firm with 10,000 employees and over 40+ products and a global customer base of 40 million people.

The firm consistently had over one million quarterly customer support requests and over two hundred thousand product tests with a data warehouse that had over a hundred million records, and added tens of thousands of new records a week. The management wanted to perform quality assurance across the entire architecture of the customer management system on a component by component basis. Also, they wanted to support ongoing quality assurance of the customer management system, as the quality of lab tests and system data is vital for marketing new products to customers.

The firm also had a significant opportunity to capitalize on government-provided stimulus funds and needed to improve and automate customer management workflow. However, their quality requirements were extremely niche, and spanned both the products and customer care sides of the pharmaceutical industry. Also, they wanted to gain a bigger footprint in the market by raising their data quality to the highest standards.

Akvarr developed a high-level test improvement roadmap, that including a task priority list and a number of resources which were required to implement strategic objectives. We evaluated testing activities throughout the SDLC and reviewed processes to understand current waterfall and future agile practices. Also, we reviewed governance activities for insight into their current controls, metrics and reporting activities and identified improvements required to better support business growth. Akvarr assessed high-level effectiveness of their current tools and made strategic recommendations for enhancing traceability, defect management, metrics and reporting. Our team assisted in the release schedule and management activities, and identified constraints and initiatives necessary for improving test planning, procedures and execution. We planned a set of metrics to better track defects, measure test progress, and product quality as well as production readiness.

We were able to develop a proactive IT quality governance model and aligned initiatives to business priorities, thus drove greater value by transforming their business models that resulted in an increase in product quality was by 14%, an increase in customer satisfaction by 15%. Also it led to an improvement in efficiency and time to market for new products by 12%.