ITM: Efficient document migration to Veeva QualityDocs

ITM is a leading radiopharmaceutical biotech company working to significantly improve treatment outcomes and the quality of life for cancer patients. To continue to achieve these goals, ITM needed a smart way to efficiently migrate all the relevant SOPs from their legacy document management system to Veeva QualityDocs – all while skillfully managing resources.

Challenges

In any project, it is critical to have a clear overview of data and information and to ensure efficient use of resources. In this case, the team quickly realized that the data was more complex than initially presumed, creating challenges for data review – especially in the final project stages.

Complex Data

It is often not possible to migrate data and documents from another system directly into Veeva. In this case, the data in ITM’s legacy system was mainly written in German and frequently included multiple values in a single cell, often making lookups impossible and manual workarounds too risky.

Resource Allocation and Timing

The complexity of the data also posed a resource challenge. Both ITM’s team and Epista had spend extra time to review the data for migration to ensure that the values and content could be transferred into their new Veeva system. This data review occurred late in the process and, due to the complexity of the data, took longer to fix and adjust at this stage.

Solution

To best complete this migration, Epista needed to complete a data health check to gather a full overview and assessment of the current situation at ITM. Once we had a clear idea of the status of ITM’s data, the project began with a migration plan and report written by our Epista subject-matter-expert with the help of ITM’s validation team. Next, we enriched and cleaned the data. This included:

• Harmonizing the complex data by correcting errors for identical data entries
• Validating the data by ensuring all inputs from the legacy system had a matching category to for compatibility in Veeva
• Converting the data by translating German entries to English

With thousands of documents coming from a several sources – each with their own method for naming, storing, etc. – data harmonization was key to qualifying the migration, verifying the results, and to the overall success of the migration project.

To handle all these tasks, Epista’s expert created various pre-qualified scripts to harmonize, validate, and convert the data ahead of migration – leading to a highly automated program to handle the migration. This pre-work, along with the thorough testing of the automated approach resulted in an efficient migration process.

Critical Success Factors

Strong Communication and Collaboration

Ensuring correct and complete data transfers can be a challenging task that can often exhaust resources. That’s why a team’s ability to communicate is so important. Over the course of this project, ITM’s internal team worked closely with the Epista team to review the data for migration. And it was this collaboration that ultimately contributed to the success of the migration.

Expertise

Having the right set of knowledge and skills is also key to achieving success. ITM’s validation team provided insight for the migration plan, while Epista’s expert created the automated program necessary to complete the migration.

Result

Epista and ITM worked as a dedicated team that expertly handled the complex data, skillfully managed limited internal resources for review, and overcame challenges with the data conversion. In the end, the collaboration between Epista and ITM resulted in a successful Veeva QualityDocs migration that was completed on time, within scope, and within budget.

Get in touch if Epista can help you find an efficient solution for your data migration