Veeva founder and CEO Peter Gassner during the Summit opening keynote.
CREDIT: VEEVA
At the Veeva R&D and Quality Summit in Boston, the company shared its approach to being a strategic partner to life sciences. Peter Gassner, the founder and CEO of Veeva, emphasized their vision: “We’re building the industry cloud for the life sciences. Software, data, and consulting to help the industry be more efficient and effective.” They intend to deliver on this vision by adhering to clear company values:
- Do the right thing
- Customer success
- Employee success
- Speed
Veeva offers a variety of products to support the growth of life sciences companies, including products for clinical, regulatory, safety, and quality, including lab information management systems (LIMS). Many of these products were featured during the event by product experts and customers to more than 2,000 attendees across more than 100 sessions.
Jim Reilly, president of Veeva Development Cloud, summarized Veeva’s approach: “It’s about modernizing the way things are done. We’re serving them up in the cloud and implementing it very quickly, so you all can realize the benefit fast.”
Innovation anchored in AI and standardization
Veeva continues to innovate to enable their customers to grow and succeed. Two key areas are artificial intelligence (AI) and industry-standard applications. Gassner summarized Veeva’s approach to AI with these points:
- The future includes data + content + agents
- The AI agents will take the burden off the people
- AI agents will talk with other AI agents
- Deep, industry-specific agents will be in all Veeva applications
Veeva will innovate in AI the same way they develop their other products—by listening to their customers and partnering with them. Gassner emphasized this point by saying, “We’ll figure it out together. That’s what partners do. I want to make life sciences the shining example of how to adopt AI in an industry for good. For the good of the patients, for the people in the industry. I think we can do it together.”
He demonstrated his commitment to their AI strategy by saying, “The goal of Veeva AI is to increase industry productivity—better medicine to more patients faster.”
Another focus area is increasing life sciences productivity through simplification and standardization. Many of the processes in life sciences are approached and executed similarly across the industry. Gassner shared this vision of the future:
“One of our core goals is to simplify and standardize technology in life sciences. Help increase speed and quality for every company. It’s how people can work better together with common ways of working. When you simplify and standardize, it helps with innovation. When the core things get easier and take less time and focus, it frees up people. These things become enablers for innovation.”
The value of being heard
During the Summit, it was obvious how important customer feedback, questions, and challenges are to Veeva. Everyone from the CEO to the product experts listened intently to the attendees. Every session featured speakers who talked about the value of the partnership and how well Veeva listened to their issues, problems, and goals. Cindy Novak, an IT leader with more than 30 years of experience in the biotech and pharmaceutical industries, emphasized the importance of a partnership:
“They solicit our input. That’s the chance for our voices as customers to be heard. We’ve said, can we do this differently? And the answer might not be ‘yes’ right this minute. But they take note, and you’ll probably see it in a future release. The most important thing, and what this really all comes down to, is that we can grow together.”
Through these partnerships, customers are transforming their businesses. In Veeva Quality Cloud, customers talked about shifting the quality function from an oversight organization to a key partner delivering business value. Some of the key aspects of this shift are to simplify and standardize quality through a wide range of improvements, such as leveraging data for proactive management, optimizing processes, being more agile and innovative, driving risk-based quality, and being fit for purpose and fit for the future.
Laquisha Crawford, vice president of global quality systems at FUJIFILM Biotechnologies, shared her thoughts as they worked through a new electronic document management system (EDMS) implementation: “Veeva is highly collaborative and a very strong partner. We talk all the time, and they are highly engaged.”
Strong and effective partners not only share their expertise, but they also share their networks. Customers commented on the importance of connecting with peer organizations who are willing to share experiences, advice, and learnings. Crawford added:
“We find that Veeva has been a great partner. Because of their footprint in the industry, they’ve already worked with clients that have gone through the exact same thing that we’re going through. They can connect you with a client, or they can recommend partners that allow you to have in-depth discussions. I think that’s something important to know, that Veeva really has something different from other companies.”
Gassner echoed Crawford’s experience. “The whole Veeva team is committed to customer success and the industry’s success. We’re committed to product excellence, and we want to be a long-term partner, a trusted partner, the partner to the industry.”
Customer success takes center stage
Veeva Quality Cloud president Mike Jovanis.
CREDIT: VEEVA
Veeva Quality Cloud president Mike Jovanis shared during his keynote, “Our Veeva Quality vision is to optimize and simplify quality processes for greater efficiency. We do that by bringing together what has historically been a very siloed set of applications for the industry, unifying QA, QC, and training.” The efforts are moving the industry forward to accelerate time to market. Veeva customers verified this by sharing successes, challenges, learnings, and best practices throughout the event.
A large biopharma standardizing quality across people, process, and technology is focused on creating value across the organization. “With Veeva, we moved to global procedures and asked our teams to adopt them. After implementing several processes, like complaints and deviations, we can retire hundreds of expired documents and trainings. This delivers significant value,” said a quality technology leader at the organization.
With experience implementing Veeva LIMS for a flexible and scalable QC system, Novak said, “We have a LIMS that is designed to meet our current needs and can grow to meet our future needs. We have our SOPs, work instructions, and training. Validation is risk-based, leveraging best practices, and the team is fully bought in. Implementation of Veeva Quality and LIMS helps to deeply impact lives.”
A contract development and manufacturing organization (CDMO), Resilience is expanding its digital validation for wider adoption and efficiency. “With our long-term vision to grow, it was time to add a scalable digital validation solution. Veeva Validation Management meets our validation needs and helps to streamline our process,” said Shashank Kadam, senior director, head of digital compliance at Resilience.
FUJIFILM Biotechnologies is shifting from a site-based quality approach to a unified global strategy that will drive consistency across the organization. “FUJIFILM’s approach is to be a partner for life with our clients, shifting the traditional sponsor-CDMO relationship to be more collaborative. With this strategy, we have transitioned the way we work to truly harmonize our processes on one quality system. We’re focused on implementing one system with Veeva, one global set of policies, and one global set of SOPs for our sites. This allows our customers to leverage and gain value from our entire network,” said Crawford.
The industry partner for life sciences
Biopharmas have a variety of choices when it comes to finding the right partner for advancing product development, quality, manufacturing, and lab informatics. The industry provides a wide range of options, approaches, and styles. It is important to decide what kind of partner can help you get the most out of the systems and drive a beneficial return on investment (ROI).
Veeva has built a reputation as a company that listens remarkably well. They truly value the voices of their customers and are committed to being the partner that helps drive the industry forward.
Scott D. Hanton, editorial director for Lab Manager, can be reached at shanton@labmanager.com.
