COMPANY CONFIDENTIAL. DO NOT DISCLOSE.
Digital transformation changed the nature of work. Perrigo saw that as an opportunity.
With JMP Live, Perrigo’s R&D group consolidated data workflows and deepened enterprisewide collaboration between subject matter experts, statisticians and leadership. Faster decision making at scale has since accelerated product development cycles.
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Challenge: For years, JMP statistical discovery software has been a go-to data workflow tool for scientists at Perrigo. While the platform helped to resolve pain points like expensive, time-consuming experimentation, however, a more streamlined workflow also exposed areas where inefficiency persisted; namely, in communications between subject matter experts and decision makers. This disconnect, says chemist Dan Biber, had become the key “rate limiter” of the R&D cycle at Perrigo.
Solution: JMP Live, a secure, enterprisewide knowledge-sharing platform, gives greater visibility to scientists’ results and discoveries by allowing them to share dynamic data analysis in JMP with non-users at the executive level, all via web browser. Rolled out across Perrigo’s R&D organization, the system has amplified the impact of subject matter expertise and allowed decision makers deeper insight into the positioning of the entire organization.
Results: The introduction of JMP Live has not only closed communication gaps, it has also saved valuable time, deepened process understanding, increased transparency and built consensus around a single version of truth now driving Perrigo’s digital transformation. By expediting the process not just from data to results but from data to decision, the company has accelerated development cycles, putting innovation in affordable therapeutics into the hands of patients faster than ever before.
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Scientists and engineers at Irish-American pharmaceutical manufacturer Perrigo have a long history with JMP® statistical discovery software. From chemical analysis and experimental design to quality and reliability, JMP is the standard tool for domain experts to base their science in reproducible, data-driven foundations.
“At Perrigo, we’ve been using JMP for a long time now,” explains statistician AJ Kaur. “And we’ve only increased the number of users since [we acquired our first license].” The platform, she says, has helped raise the level of statistical proficiency among subject matter experts who now work more strategically, finding new ways to augment scientific knowledge with best practices like design of experiments (DOE).
As Perrigo’s culture has evolved in line with its digital transformation initiatives, however, scientists’ needs have also changed. While the widespread adoption of JMP resolved previous pain points like costly one-factor-at-a-time experimentation and time delays associated with data preparation, more streamlined analytics workflows have exposed areas where, by contrast, inefficiency persisted.
“We were experiencing a lot of frustration around sending or communicating [data and results],” recalls chemist Dan Biber, adding that, from a subject matter expert’s perspective, the inability to share data in an interactive way had become the primary “rate limiter” affecting Perrigo’s development timelines. Despite increased individual productivity, he explains, delays in decision making often stymied the timely implementation of solutions or improvements. But with information siloed between individual JMP users, leadership struggled to overcome barriers hindering collective decision making.
For Kaur and Biber, the logical solution was to upgrade from JMP to JMP Live, an enterprisewide online analytics platform that allows anyone who deals with data – be they JMP users or not – to manage, interact and explore analyses digitally.
“JMP Live just seemed to fit really well with [our workflow],” Biber says. “And it has solved a lot of the frustrations I had both as a chemist and as a JMP user.”
JMP Live removes barriers to collaborative decision making
From an enterprisewide viewpoint, JMP Live is a reflection of how modern organizations work today using technology to cut through communication barriers. By extending the robust statistical capabilities of JMP to the web where anyone within an organization can access shared knowledge and analysis, JMP Live streamlines not just the time from data to results but from data to delivery.
“JMP Live in a lot of ways has facilitated less experienced users seeing just what super-users can do [with analytics]. Having reports already there on JMP Live gives any interested colleague the ability to then interact, share and have those conversations,” Biber says. “You have access to not just the data I'm producing, but the repository for all project-related statistical reports – all of it, not just a single file.”
Instead of emailing tables or using shared folders, he explains, the team can now distribute interactive JMP Reports in a single click to inform decision making conversations. Whereas previously they had to sacrifice some of the more compelling elements of JMP Reports to share HTML or “flat images” with leadership, the team is now getting more real-time power from the software.
“If I’d done an analysis and the team thought of an alteration, I would have to go do it and send it to them. It was only after they’d looked it over that the team would get together again,” Kaur adds, noting that JMP Live eliminates many of the standard workflow steps. Anyone on the team, regardless of their role, can now explore JMP Reports by applying data filters or column switchers, for example, and see only the most up-to-date, real-time iteration of any analysis.
“I’ve been a chemist for a long time and there has always been a need to go further with analysis statistically,” Biber says. “I've always really liked JMP for its ability to tell stories with data,” and, he adds, JMP Live is the natural extension of that storytelling platform. Using JMP Live in meetings allows analysts and management to interact with the data in real time, filtering for certain scenarios and transforming visualizations on the spot.
Integration with videoconferencing application Microsoft Teams ensures data drives every discussion
With meetings now an opportunity for discovery, not just deliberation, Kaur and Biber jumped at the chance to further integrate JMP Live with other workflow tools like business communications platform Microsoft Teams. With its workspace chat and videoconferencing applications, Teams had become Perrigo’s enterprisewide standard for digital collaboration.
“Microsoft Teams actually interfaces with JMP Live perfectly,” Biber says. “The browser inside Teams links directly into JMP Live, so we can drop any project group right into Teams and JMP Live [becomes] just another tab that we’re interfacing with. It’s really a seamless application.”
Looking at data visualizations – and exploring analyses in real-time – has as a result become a standard part of every meeting, whether between teams of scientists, scientists and statisticians, or scientists and decision makers. “[The JMP Live / Microsoft Teams integration] breaks down a lot of the tension between domain expertise and statistics,” Biber adds. “You don't have to launch a separate software that may have a barrier to entry. JMP is no longer that statistical magic that can be a little bit [intimidating] to engage with; now it's just a normal part of our workflow.”
With digital integration not limited solely to Microsoft Teams – JMP Live also works seamlessly with Atlassian’s collaboration software Confluence, for example – there is potential to infuse all familiar business processes with analytics. It’s in keeping with the spirit of Perrigo’s broader digital transformation, Kaur says. Automation and these kinds of customizations have enhanced the JMP experience as teams automate routine tasks and optimize all aspects of analysis from exploration to reporting.
Building consensus around a single version of truth
“Scientists are very encouraged,” Kaur says. “They’re saying ‘Okay, this is not something new that I'm getting into, it’s already familiar,’ and they’re more motivated to use it.” Furthermore, with the JMP Scripting Language (JSL), statistical experts like she and Biber can easily roll out customized scripts to teams across Perrigo, creating a more reproducible, automated system for updating reports on the server.
One area where customization has been especially critical, Biber explains, is in working with formal stability data, which he says often require a series of time-consuming manual queries. Though stability data query workflows used to require a significant time investment, Biber has since scripted queries that dramatically accelerate the process and can quickly be rolled out to scientists with less statistical expertise.
Now when a team begins a new project, Biber explains, he uses JSL to “query out of the relational database, clean up the data, write a report and publish it to JMP Live and straight to that team.” By automating the query process, the report will update in real time whenever the data does, saving time and also eliminating potential errors and miscommunication. It’s a great example, he says, of the effect JMP Live has on other parts of the analytics workflow with things like data collection, preparation and processing. “A lot of those pain points seem to be resolved with JMP Live,” he says. “Now if [scientists] are wanting to do capability analysis to set specs or extrapolations for stability, they're able to do all of that almost on a daily basis… so that’s a big time savings.”
The more automated and standardized scientific workflows become, the more Perrigo as an organization builds transparency and consensus around a single version of truth; people at all proficiency levels across the company understand the “why” driving decisions. Moreover, decision makers gain a more meaningful birds-eye view of the company’s positioning. That collective process understanding and the ability to make decisions at scale, Biber says, helps accelerate development cycles and ultimately gets Perrigo’s products to market faster.
These benefits are hard to deny for a company like Perrigo where leadership embraced a mature analytics culture from the early days of digitization. With the move to JMP Live, Biber recalls, there was an immediate “wave of relief – and competence – as [decision makers] began to interact.” Instead of presenting a still image to stakeholders and upper management and saying, “take my word for it,” Biber invites them into a conversation.
“JMP Live is one of those tools that has really helped boost the imagination of our leadership toward automation,” he says. “When we create interactive dashboards, that piques the curiosity [of everyone involved] to say, ‘What other data sources do we have… and where can we create a better level of integration?’ Now we’re doing it. And JMP Live is there to help.”
