Astellas, a pharmaceutical company focused on drug discovery and new treatments, is currently expanding its use of ServiceNow to better organize work across the organization. The goal is to automate processes so that its employees don’t have to spend time performing mundane tasks and instead invest time in high-value work.
The company did not begin its work with ServiceNow with this goal in mind, but found that the ability to help identify when processes are lacking is proving valuable. And this is particularly important because of the line of work that Astellas is involved in. Speaking to Paul Mukherjee, Senior Director of Digital Architecture and Solutions at Astellas Europe, he explained the critical nature of the pharma company’s ambitions. He said:
At a high level, our organization’s mission is to turn cutting-edge science into value for patients. We are a full, traditional end-to-end pharmaceutical company. We don’t do generics. We do not do vaccinations. We focus from early stage basic research leading to drug discovery, through clinical trials, manufacturing, commercialization, product launch, and then tracking and monitoring. We do that all over the world.
However, what we are trying to do is identify what we call areas of unmet medical need. And use that to focus on the patients we want to help. We are not necessarily interested in trying to come up with a better treatment for a condition for which there are already several good treatments available. But if there’s a condition where there’s no treatment available or the treatments that are available aren’t particularly good, that’s more in our sweet spot.
Astellas is forward thinking when it comes to its use of digital tools. For example, it has sophisticated AI and robotics capabilities when it comes to early drug discovery, helping in areas such as finding new cancer treatments. However, when looking at its adoption by ServiceNow, one of its main goals is to ensure it has access to the best talent. Mukherjee said:
There are many different sides to this. There’s the operational efficiency argument, which is basically the things we can automate, we try and automate as much as we can. It frees up money, it frees up time.
But most importantly, it allows our people to focus on things that only humans can do. Like many industries, in the pharmaceutical industry there is a shortage of talent. We don’t want our people to spend their time doing tasks that you can automate.
Interestingly, Astellas did not initially envision ServiceNow playing a critical role in this ambition. ServiceNow started with the company as a replacement for its configuration management database – before realizing it had more sophisticated capabilities. Mukherjee said the platform is now strategic to the organization. He explained:
There are native capabilities around workflow automation, which ServiceNow gives you. So, we get a basic level of task automation through this. But what I think going forward is that, as we start to look at more complex distributed process automation solutions, ServiceNow will be the hub for those distributed automations – orchestrated across different pieces.
And in particular, one of the challenges around some of that complex automation is tracking where things fail, so you know where to go and fix it. And I see ServiceNow as a key enabler for us to understand: this point in the process that failed, this system, so we can test that system.
An operating platform
Mukherjee said Astellas has a wide range of automation, API management and RPA-based tooling, but ServiceNow will be a key enabler for all these components in the entire automation ecosystem. Astellas has now rolled out most of its processes within its IS organization on top of ServiceNow, where it serves as the company’s operating platform.
Giving an example of Astellas’ processes that need to be improved, Mukherjee said:
As a company, we outsource a lot. So our processes to manage our partners have evolved over time, but they are very complex and unnecessarily complex. One of the things we did was we started this process to start engaging with a vendor. And we used to have to actually fill out multiple tabs on an Excel sheet and then email it around.
It will be emailed to various parties. And if someone forgets about it you won’t know what its status is. It’s just a painful process and once someone forgets, no one knows. Two weeks later, you’re ready to start chasing the vendor, who is struggling, and realize they didn’t actually get the request.
And ServiceNow is proving helpful to help automate some of this pain. Mukherjee added:
So we actually implemented a very simple workflow solution using ServiceNow. It really takes all the pain out of the process. We have a direct form in ServiceNow where we upload all the information.
We say, who are the types of approval parties for different parts of the organization? So, finance, HR and so on – then we have a sort of standard process that goes through. And at any time, you can see where it is in the process, so it gives us full transparency throughout the process, which is a big help in our collaboration.
This makes it easier when we try to work together on these complex processes. It makes it easier, if it’s prevented, to see where the holdup is and what we can do to eliminate the hold up.
Another example of how ServiceNow is being used at Astellas is how the company uses the platform to consolidate ad-hoc technology deployments. Mukherjee says Astellas has traditionally had a siled approach to technology deployment – where whenever someone in the business comes up with a use case, it gets deployed as a point solution. The ServiceNow platform helps deal with this. Mukherjee said:
What we’re trying to do now is try to move toward what we call a platform approach, where we want to have a smaller number of enterprise platforms, where we can deploy multiple use cases. And we see ServiceNow as one of the key enterprise platforms.
So one of the ways we can measure success is just by seeing more and more of those point solutions disappear over time, as we deploy more and more ServiceNow capabilities.
Value added work
Adopting process automation in an organization can undoubtedly create anxiety among its workforce. The fear of job transfer is common – and it’s one that Mukherjee likes to ignore. He argues, however, that the key is to communicate effectively with teams that are about changing the nature of work, not firing employees. Mukherjee said:
If we step back and think about hyper automation, one of the challenges we face is that as soon as you start talking about automating processes, people start worrying about their jobs. And this is a very reasonable fear. So one of the things we keep trying to emphasize is that automation is not going to replace people’s jobs.
That’s not what we’re trying to do here. What we’re trying to do is automate the things that can be automated, to allow people to focus on the things that only humans can do. And that makes it a more interesting discussion that you have with the people who are affected, because you can say all this boring stuff, which is just over and over again, you don’t have to do that. Interesting things, where you have to apply some real intelligence and ingenuity, that’s what you can focus on.
And when you get the messaging right, it really tends to move people from maybe blocking some of these changes to actually being supporters of some of the changes you want to make.