A platform for people, patients and the planet
Rebuilding AstraZeneca’s digital foundation
AstraZeneca delivers medicines that improve lives worldwide
With a vast global footprint and, on the strength of its science, AstraZeneca has doubled in size over the past decade.
By 2030, it plans to almost double again, reaching $80 billion in revenue.
Looking to launch 20 new medicines by 2030, including next-generation cell and gene therapies, the company has also set an ambition to become a carbon-zero organisation, drastically reducing its emissions as it grows.
Each of these ambitious goals is challenging. But to achieve all at once? Almost impossible. Unless you have the right tech, implemented in the right way.
With Deloitte as a strategic partner and a ServiceNow platform as its tech provider, AstraZeneca embarked on a comprehensive tech transformation, enabled by AI.
The result is a new tech foundation that promises to deliver over $30 million in value, empowering its people to focus on unlocking the power of what science can do, for people and the planet.
AI, automation and innovation to shape our workplaces
Every minute matters when you’re developing and providing life-saving treatments to patients.
So, for AstraZeneca’s people, efficient support services are about more than convenience. They’re a vital part of achieving the company’s shared mission.
Today, innovative tech tools provide its people with a single point of entry for support services, enabled by conversational AI to help them ask for and receive the help they need, from HR advice to IT support and compliance advice to site operations.
With ServiceNow as its backbone, AstraZeneca now has one front door through which its people can access intuitive support services, anytime, anywhere, through Ask AZ online and mobile portals, across 128 countries.
It wasn’t always that way. As a tech pioneer, AstraZeneca was an early adopter of ServiceNow a decade ago.
But years of customisation had resulted in 16 hard-to-use platforms that were expensive to maintain and difficult to scale. The result was incomplete data, inflexible processes and costly upgrades hampering the company’s ambitions.
“We needed to enable new capabilities across the business – that was the ambition,” says Dinesh Krishnan, AstraZeneca’s head of enterprise platforms. “And we wanted AI to be the front-runner in terms of everything we do.”
We wanted AI to be the front-runner in terms of everything we do.
Dinesh Krishnan, head of enterprise platforms and programme lead, AstraZeneca
This was a large and complex transformation which underpinned key aspects of AstaZeneca’s strategic ambition. Flawless execution was critical to our collective success.
Richard Baderman, partner, Deloitte
A system rebuilt to last
A team from Deloitte collaborated with AstraZeneca to support its "future of work" transformation, with the goal of enabling its sustainable growth in a way that would be time and cost efficient.
AstraZeneca’s ambitions included creating an industry-leading HR experience to help attract and retain the very best talent, digitising manual processes, scaling capabilities across its business and dismantling functional silos.
When a dynamic cross-functional team from IT, HR, Finance, and Global Business Services united in 2023 to build a compelling business case for upgrading AstraZeneca’s ServiceNow platform, it marked the beginning of a crucial transformation journey.
“AstraZeneca’s pace of growth meant that there was an overly complex set of processes and data systems,” explains Deloitte partner Richard Baderman.
“We needed to harmonise processes and drive automation and insight, based on accurate data. ServiceNow was the key to enabling change and unlocking value.”
To deliver the project, Deloitte assembled a global ServiceNow team, with expertise from the UK and Northern Ireland, the US, India and Poland.
Besides implementing out-of-the-box solutions for core functions, including HR, IT, Global Business Services, Procurement and Finance, it involved creating a centre for enablement operating model, so the business could – safely and rapidly – innovate for itself in the future.
Working together seamlessly meant we were able to re-platform AstraZeneca’s operations in just nine months – half the time this kind of transformation usually takes.
From the past to the future
Today, the transformation has reduced operating costs, boosted employee productivity and released value, while AI is freeing up capacity and enabling innovation.
AstraZeneca’s data shows, across IT alone, the project is expected to save $14 million in 2025. A smart vendor management system is helping users across 80 markets to select suppliers, saving over 13,000 days. And, for HR, improved preboarding and onboarding have accelerated joining times by over a month, releasing more than 90,000 hours back into the organisation.
Learning and knowledge have been improved by the curation, cleansing and tagging of 20,000 documents. Thanks to Generative AI, employees have an accurate, intuitive knowledge base at their fingertips. And, in a highly regulated industry, AI is simplifying compliance.
Replacing legacy systems with a modern foundation in such a short timeframe, and successfully delivering a no-defects launch, required a shared vision and one-team culture.
“Openness, clear guiding principles and executive sponsorship were established from the start,” Richard concludes.
“Key issues were immediately flagged, the right people (from both sides) were brought in to solve them and we leveraged our principles to ensure continued progress. This prevented problems escalating into major roadblocks.”
More than a tech implementation, this has been about transforming people’s everyday experience.
Ultimately, it’s creating more time for researchers, scientists and commercial teams to focus on what’s important.
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