When we discovered modern medicine, soon came with it the realization that we can bend the curve of life. Now, with advance gene therapies having answers to the most complex and unmet healthcare challenges like Spinal Muscular Atrophy (SMA) or leukemia, we at Novartis are dramatically transforming the lives - not only of our patients but also of families affected by these devastating diseases.
Even with these miracles of modern medicines, many lives still do not get the second chance they truly deserve. At Novartis, we impact over 800 million patients every year. Even with a number like that, we still have a long way to go to cater to the unmet healthcare needs across the globe. So, while many stakeholders in our own eco-system would describe our work as centered around the patient – from the perspective of patients, it does not necessarily feel that way. The only way we can help improve access and ensure our medicines reach our patients faster and at a lesser cost, is by bringing in disruptive innovation for better productivity and to make our internal processes simpler.
Customer and Technology Solutions (CTS) delivers high-quality services, insights and capabilities to all of Novartis in areas such as Technology Transformation, Procurement, People and Organization, Commercial, Medical, Clinical, Legal and Consulting Services and Solutions, Financial Reporting and Accounting (FRA), Real Estate and Facility Services (REFS), Digital Transformation & Innovation and Data Science & AI and Data Management. CTS combines deep functional expertise with advanced, integrated data analytics to deliver an innovative and data-driven approach to business services thus playing a critical role in the delivery of the Novartis mission.
Customer and Technology Solutions X (CTSX) operates as an internal ‘edge’ organization to facilitate and develop exponential disruptive solutions at scale for CTS at Novartis. This team engages actively with the external eco-system, Novartis Biome, and our domain organizations – Consulting, IT, Finance Operations, Procurement, HR Solutions, and Real Estate & Facility Services – to help CTS become an industry-leading enterprise transformation engine. CTSX enables us to disrupt the very business of ‘business services’, leveraging technology, external start-ups and disruptive innovation.
Launched in February 2020, a month before the pandemic, CTSX has so far seen multiple projects that have entered the scale-up stage after going through rigorous rounds evaluation by the CTSX team and the CTSX board, in addition to the successful completion of the pilots. This team’s journey began with a goal to generate value to the tune of five hundred million out of which 168 million has already been delivered.
With a mandate to fail fast, CTSX is no regular team and stands out for its unique structure.
It includes Disruptors, Creators, a Board (including an external thought leader), a Founder and Disruption Partners (representatives from our partner companies that we closely work with). These partner companies are all leaders in the areas such as tech, consulting and commercial real estate. The disruptors and creators have all been recruited internally with representation from prominent CTS domains. The team operates like a start-up with an exclusive mandate for 10X innovation.
From a Talent Intelligence Platform (TIP) for organizations that leverage AI to hire, engage and nurture talent; to a platform for businesses to build customizable apps for automating different parts of their business, here are the examples of start-ups CTSX has engaged with, in its short journey.
Start-up One: It has created a Talent Intelligence Platform (TIP) for organizations that leverage AI to hire, engage and nurture talent. Talent centric applications built on TIP empower candidates to find the best “next” job and enable enterprises to reduce time to hire, cost of hire and improve quality of hire.
Start-up Two: It blends machine learning and industrial organizational psychology in talent screening and asynchronous interviewing to de-bias and future proof hiring processes.
Start-up Three: It has built an AI-based asynchronous interview tool with multilingual marketplace and lo-fi reach to rural areas.
Start-up Four: It applies artificial intelligence in many forms, from intuitive bots that self-learn, through to intelligent tools that transform data insights into powerful business solutions.
Start-up Five: Delivers world’s leading AI platform for modern finance teams. Starting with business spend, this start-up automates the manual process, uncovers problems, and optimizes decision making for enterprises around the globe.
Start-up Six: A platform for businesses to build customizable apps for automating different parts of their business. The platform comes equipped with the tools for reading documents, data extraction and classification, natural language processing, and optical character recognition.
Start-up Seven: Assists customer-service agents in real time. It dynamically guides agents through each turn of a conversation based on analysis of your top performers and most successful outcomes. The solution provides language that keeps sales on track and reduces customers abandoning the conversation.
Start-up Eight: Through experiences, it has discovered a revolutionary way to combine machine learning and human intuition to empower professionals to define, understand and improve metrics that really matter.
Resma - Resma is about auto-resolving a significant chunk of our internal tickets more effectively by using AI. When something doesn’t work around their work scope, our associates raise tickets – more so virtually. Resma is already helping us reduce the time for resolving tickets in less than a few minutes. It has resulted in high user satisfaction while improving the productivity of our associates. We have been able to achieve 20% self-resolved tickets with more to go. It is now the platform of choice for any virtual assistant type of work across Novartis.
One of the other scale-up projects, Augmented and Real-time Analytics (AURA) will now be deployed across the Insights and Commercial Solutions (ICS) teams at Novartis with a bolder vision to roll it out for the entire organization in the next two-three years. AURA aims to transform business analysts into citizen data scientists and allow business teams to move from 'What' to 'Why' through deeper insights - instantly and driving actions in real time.
CTSX approach is outcome-driven and has six stages - Discover, Ideate, Design, Incubate, Pilot and Scale.
CTSX currently has multiple projects in various stages, after undergoing several rounds of ideation, incubation and evaluation.
Some of the noteworthy projects include:
- Reduce complexity and improve spending on low-dollar transactions
- Compete in the race for talent using AI-based candidate profile screening & matching
- Implement a more open talent sourcing model by incorporating crowd-sourcing & freelancing
- Use augmented analytics and data science by business users for real time decision making.
We collaborate, ideate and execute solutions that give businesses the edge they need to scale new heights.
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