Business And Data Analytics

To Achieve Productive Outcomes

- Todd Simpson

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulates foods, drugs, biologics, medical devices, cosmetics, dietary supplements, tobacco products, electronic products and more. Between 2009 and 2013, the FDA’s roles and responsibilities increased considerably as a result of five significant pieces of legislation, leading to an even larger amount of data influx from multiple sources. Analyzing this vast amount of data created a tremendous challenge, especially when scrutinizing data around adverse events, which could mean the difference between life and death.

Last year, in order to gain a more complete understanding of what was needed to utilize this data to make real-time decisions, the FDA conducted a business intelligence (BI) assessment to determine the best technology to help meet the FDA’s growing analytics needs. The assessment uncovered system-wide bottlenecks, constrained resources, and delayed time to value with key data sets across the roughly 114,000 reports and more than 145 data sets that currently only leverage the web intelligence feature of the SAP Business Object Suite.

New Year. New Technology

Because of the assessment, the FDA decided to enhance our BI technology to meet the growing analytics needs, update technical and architectural components that were causing latency and reporting issues, improve data sharing abilities, provide better end-to-end visibility, and expand access to end-user training.