More than ever, drug makers need to be fleet and flexible — and they need their software to be the same. Today's integration
approaches do not support the level of responsiveness that firms need to react to the changing regulatory and competitive
landscape in which they operate. However, by breaking down an application into 'services', IT providers may have hit on a
way for their software to drive innovation at every point in the value chain.
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Bringing a pharmaceutical or biologic to market takes more than just good science: it takes an agile business that can respond
to the changing market and environment by aligning business processes with flexible IT. Separate challenges confront R&D,
manufacturing and sales and marketing. R&D is compelled to accelerate time-to-market of novel treatments and extend its reach
in global markets. Likewise, manufacturing is undergoing sweeping changes, incorporating more efficient, quality-centric methods,
and streamlining processes that scale across regions and partners. Financial and regulatory demands on sales and marketing
are forcing companies to evaluate ways to increase sales effectiveness, such as multichannel business models, direct-to-consumer
marketing, partnering and new customer models. Technology integration challenges hamper all of these areas. Service-oriented
architecture (SOA) can help address these systems' integration challenges across the organization, and serve as the new blueprint
to help companies align business and IT. This article will demonstrate how SOA can address challenges in manufacturing and
is intended for business executives to explore how SOA can help them effectively respond to today's evolving and complex business
models.Introduction
Figure 1 Todays release process involves many manual, iterative processes.
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Biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies (biopharma) are challenged today by complex scientific information and the need
to make faster business decisions — all in the context of a global marketplace. Many organizations are actively collaborating
and partnering to augment their core competencies, and extend business beyond organizational and geographic boundaries. Companies
have invested in many forms of technology to enable business processes, integrate their organization and support innovation.Businesses seek flexibility within a compliant environment — their processes are not static — and they endeavour to constantly
improve the way they implement their strategy. IT solutions need to support that flexibility. Today's integration approaches
do not support the level of responsiveness for continuous improvement. SOA has the potential to dramatically address this
challenge and benefit an organization when:
- Business users exchange information across multiple systems.
- Business processes span several applications across partners.
- Businesses are transitioning to newly merged or acquired business owners
- Business users need information in near real-time.
- Point-to-point solutions prevail with fixed interfaces that are costly to maintain.
But what is SOA, and how can this architectural approach provide an organization with the levels of efficiency and responsiveness
it needs to effectively compete in today's changing market?
Service-oriented architecture
Figure 2 A revised product-release process.
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SOA is a style of developing and integrating software. It involves breaking an application down into common, repeatable 'services'
that can be used by other applications, both internal and external, in an organization — independent of the applications and
computing platforms on which the business and its partners rely. Using this approach, enterprises can assemble and reassemble
these open, standards-based services to extend and improve integration among existing applications. SOA can also support collaboration,
build new capabilities and drive innovation at every point in the value chain.The power behind SOA is the ability to share services through system-to-system interactions that could improve efforts to
adapt end-to-end processes. SOA helps automate process steps; remove redundancy; use messaging and alerts to trigger essential
people-powered workflow; and enable new capabilities. When a company adds new applications and retires old ones, SOA can help
facilitate the transition and migration. With time, services may be modified, shared and recombined to streamline activities
across yet more applications. This approach allows companies to more efficiently automate regulated and compliance-driven
activities?— freeing people to perform higher-level activities and providing an integrated business view to authorized staff
across departments and organizations. In time, SOA can support continuous improvement through monitoring and redesigning processes
linked to technology services.
Figure 3 A closer look at an enterprise content management system providing SOA.
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SOA offers an integrated, collaborative approach to aligning business and IT services and supports evolving business needs.
The business must be actively involved, however, to identify the processes that must be managed on an ongoing basis. Current
IT integration methods can continue to exist because SOA preserves legacy systems through the use of services. SOA can be
applied using a small, step-wise approach that can grow as companies add more processes and applications. As a skipping stone
creates ripples in a lake, SOA can help create benefits that quickly ripple through many other areas of the organization and
partners. SOA is easier to understand through real-life examples. Below, the authors examine an industry-specific critical
issue within the manufacturing organization to show where SOA approaches enhance information sharing for internal systems
and support tighter integration with manufacturing business partners.
