Data Democratization on AWS Enhances Patient Experience at Amgen

Amgen, a leading manufacturer and distributor of pharmaceuticals experienced a significant surge in consumers and data volume. To address this, the company migrated from its on-premises system to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and onboarded AWS partner Agilisium. Amgen had three primary objectives: integrate data across the organization, improve data management, and ensure the availability and democratization of diverse data sets for stakeholders. For Amgen, Agilisium used AWS services to rearchitect a commercial data lake and a data warehouse with end-to-end process automation. As a result, Amgen accelerated data availability and accessibility for stakeholders, and experienced a multimillion-dollar annual cost avoidance.

Driven by its mission of improving patient outcomes, Amgen expanded its product portfolio in pharmaceutical manufacturing. As a result, the company experienced a surge in the volume and variety of data sets required for analytics and insight generation. These data sets supported several crucial daily decisions throughout the company’s ecosystem and included marketing, prescription, sales, claims, interaction, and other data. The company was also experiencing a parallel surge in the stakeholder and consumer base for its processed data sets. With this growth, the existing on-premises technology made it challenging to scale operations and protracted key business decisions by delaying access to vital business insights. Integrating data was expensive and time consuming, and the resulting metrics were often inconsistent and prone to error.

To address these challenges, Amgen leaders decided to migrate their on-premises system to AWS and engaged Agilisium, an AWS Partner. To rearchitect a commercial data lake for Amgen, Agilisium leveraged the capabilities of Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and constructed a data warehouse with Amazon Redshift. The commercial data lake and the data warehouse transformed data management at Amgen, while streamlining and democratizing data access across the enterprise.

Whether internal or from a third party, data sets at Amgen are now easily onboarded and integrated. This ensures that stakeholders can quickly and securely access the data pertinent to their daily processes and decision making. Data processing time also improved, dropping from 48 hours to 12 hours, increasing efficiency by 75 percent. The Amgen team was able to easily ingest several petabytes of new data sets without disrupting system performance. Amgen Senior Manager of Commercial Data Sciences Sheetal Pillai elaborates: “We grew from hundreds to thousands of users, while reducing the errors in our data metrics. Now we can easily onboard new data sets without compromising our existing system performance.” These new approaches to data management and processing enabled Amgen to scale more quickly, reduce time-to market, and unlock significantly more computing power.

As new data management tools enabled Amgen to scale more quickly, the company also experienced a significantly lower cost to scale, leading to a multimillion-dollar cost avoidance. This significant cost avoidance enabled Amgen to repurpose funds for the exploration and adoption of innovative, cutting-edge data analytics solutions. These analytics capabilities support the company’s larger mission of improving quality of life and long-term outcomes for patients by accelerating access to data and insights for its user base.

Vishnu Maddileti, Director of Data Sciences at Amgen, shares more: “This multimillion-dollar cost avoidance for our infrastructure with AWS and Agilisium allows us to invest in market-leading, cutting-edge technologies and generate innovative data driven predictive and prescriptive analytics.”

Following the migration to AWS and the development of its commercial data lake and data warehouse, Amgen also experienced a shift in its ability to successfully fulfill SLAs with ease and increased speed and agility. The company can now release data to stakeholders within a day of data receipt from a third party instead of multiple days

The comprehensive suite of tools and services at AWS are essential to Amgen’s commercial data platform. Amazon Redshift supports thousands of Amgen stakeholders in accessing forecasting, commercial insights, field force structuring, reporting and incentive compensation functions. For its massive data storage needs, Amgen relies on Amazon S3. For its large-scale orchestration tool, and to host many of its most critical applications, Amgen leverages the capabilities of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2).

The collaboration with Agilisium has enabled Amgen to optimize its usage of the computing capabilities of AWS. Vishnu Maddileti elaborates, “From endless computing power, to reduced cycle time and easier data access, the new efficiency supported by Agilisium and enabled by AWS helps us to produce timely insights about products, customers, and patients and significantly enhance their experiences.”

Amgen continues to work with Agilisium on enhancing and scaling its commercial data platform to meet the diverse needs of its growing stakeholder base.