For contract research organizations (CROs), the steadily increasing cost of research trials and high levels of ever-present risk make it imperative to streamline operational costs wherever possible.

In a bid to improve their margins and build a more efficient enterprise, the customer contracted Apexon to better integrate their existing operational protocols with the Veeva CRM platform, built on Salesforce.

Many CROs outsource a significant chunk of their product detailing and sampling activities, often using highly specialized vendors. Each of these outsourced projects requires extensive data exchanges between vendor and customer.

• The existing data exchanges were being processed manually, with validation and updation occurring via Microsoft Excel, before being loaded to and from the Salesforce Platform
• Considering that the data exchanges were occurring on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis, this function incurred a high manpower cost

In order to improve the quality and speed at which data was being exchanged, Apexon specialists implemented an automation-based approach.

• We used Informatica Workflow Manager to extract the data from the Salesforce tables and flat files
• Data was processed via validation and transformation rules and uploaded into Salesforce and vice-versa
• Complete automation of the previously manual data import and export process
• Unix scripts were used to validate and transfer files to and from the customer’s SFTP server