Eliminating time-consuming tasks to focus on saving lives

AstraZeneca has a bold ambition: to find remedies for rare diseases that impact millions of people but currently lack available treatments.

Not only is the company taking on some of the world’s most difficult pharmaceutical challenges, with every day counting in the race to save lives, but AstraZeneca is also committing to aggressive goals. By 2030, it aims to have launched 20 new medicines.

If the company is to achieve its goals, it must acquire the most important resource available: time. Unlocking quality time is the fundamental driver of AstraZeneca’s partnership with ServiceNow, enabling researchers and scientists to collaborate, innovate, create, test, and launch their inventions.

Eliminating time-consuming manual tasks and working faster, smarter, and more efficiently, in every way possible, has never been more important. This is an aspiration reflected in the company’s IT motto, ‘Every Minute Matters’. By embracing the ServiceNow AI Platform for business transformation, the ultimate time-saver and simplifier, the company will further accelerate innovation and employee productivity, reduce operational costs, and enhance service resilience.

Let’s take a look at how ServiceNow is saving time for AstraZeneca, replacing multiple manual tasks with one universally available, fast, efficient, and intuitive system:

• Prioritize the science by automating repetitive, manual tasks
• Focus on the user experience to maximize adoption
• Extend value by seeing the potential for cumulative time savings
• Personalize onboarding so new recruits are productive from day one

Prioritize the science by automating repetitive, manual tasks

“Given the boldness of our ambition, IT and the use of technology are critical to achieving these results,” says Cindy Hoots, Chief Digital Officer and CIO at AstraZeneca. “At AstraZeneca, Every Minute Matters, because it’s crucial that we get lifesaving medicines to patients as quickly as possible.

“ServiceNow has been an amazing partner in helping us to think about how we can optimize the work that our scientists do every day and to streamline processes and drive efficiencies so that they can focus on the science.”

Take the routine selection, ordering, and storage of essential laboratory supplies like test tubes, for example. Bringing just one new medication to market can require millions of test tubes during the development phases. AstraZeneca discovered that employees were handwriting supply orders in a notebook, a process that took up to 30 minutes each time. Streamlining the workflow with the ServiceNow AI Platform means scientists and researchers can place supply orders in seconds using a central platform, saving time that can be spent on delivering medicines to patients.  

Focus on the user experience to maximize adoption

Bringing a new medicine to market is hugely complex, requiring some of the brightest minds in the world. It also requires elite-level project management and logistical expertise to ensure that researchers and scientists always have what they need to work quickly, efficiently, and with precision.

Eliminating manual tasks and releasing up to 30 minutes of additional time every day to researchers and scientists makes a huge contribution to AstraZeneca’s efforts to launch 20 new life-saving medicines by 2030.

To design the ideal solution, ServiceNow teams shadowed their AstraZeneca colleagues to gain a forensic understanding of the precise requirements of a world-class research laboratory.

The result is a digitized, automated, and AI-powered, end-to-end equipment and supplies selection and ordering system, located on the company’s AskAZ employee portal. User-friendly screens and familiar menus provide a fast and intuitive user experience, with access to pre-selected items from approved suppliers, enabling orders to be completed in just a few seconds.

“The ServiceNow AI Platform plays a crucial role in giving back valuable time to our researchers and scientists by streamlining their workflows and enhancing efficiencies,” says Cindy. “By taking that workload off them through simplified processes, we've reduced complexity.

“AI is permeating everything we do, it's how we will get medicines to patients faster. Having a partner that's innovative like ServiceNow, who's on that journey with us, allows us to make combined efforts to do all we can to drive better patient outcomes.”

Extend value by seeing the potential for cumulative time savings

Bringing the selection and ordering of all equipment and supplies onto the ServiceNow AI Platform is helping to power AstraZeneca’s laboratories toward their mission for 2030.

More than 60,000 requests in more than 400 categories are now flowing through the ServiceNow AI Platform annually, and with each event saving many minutes every time, the cumulative, yearly time saving is huge, estimated to be as high as 30,000 hours. Instead of this priceless time spent on manual admin tasks, it’s now used in the pursuit of life-changing medicines.

With everything in one place and rich data and analytics available, managers have instant visibility into the system, assessing buying patterns and inventory status, informing smart procurement decisions, and enabling enhancements for users.

“Everything we do here at AstraZeneca has a patient in mind, and for me, it's very personal,” says Dinesh Krishnan, Global Head of Enterprise Platforms at AstraZeneca. “It's myself, it's my friends, it's my family members. All of us know people who are patients, and that's what we're here for. The patients themselves, the families, and the communities in which we work.

“With AI built into the ServiceNow platform from day one, we can harness and drive value quicker. If processes that took 20 or 30 minutes now take seconds, and we do that over 60,000 times a year, you can imagine the scale of the time that you can free up, and the focus that you can generate by driving efficiency.”

Personalize onboarding so new recruits are productive from day one

AstraZeneca’s ambitious goals for 2030 also include substantial growth and the recruitment of more than 20,000 new employees. These new hires will join every area of the business, with everyone, both inside and outside the lab, contributing to AstraZeneca’s mission: to find remedies for diseases that impact millions of people, presenting challenges, and sometimes for which there are no current treatments available.

The company wants to provide its new colleagues with a world-class experience from their first contact, preparing them for their new career and enabling them to hit the ground running.

To support these aspirations, AstraZeneca developed Onboarding 2.0 on the ServiceNow AI Platform, a new, streamlined onboarding experience that includes personalized portals for each new hire, enabling strong productivity from day one.

“Onboarding new colleagues is a critical moment,” explains Jackie Crockford, VP of Global Business Services at AstraZeneca. “Putting AI to work for every single employee is helping us get work done more efficiently and more effectively.

“We found that managers were spending more than 50 hours onboarding employees. So, if we can remove 10% of that time by automating some of the more transactional elements rather than the human elements, we will save over 90,000 hours. At the same time, we will onboard people and welcome them into the company quicker, and unlock important, exciting insights from our new colleagues quicker too.”