Overview 

Novartis is one of the world’s largest international pharmaceutical companies supporting multiple divisions in medicine, millions of products, and over 200 innovative projects.

In 2015, Novartis launched an ambitious Hybris eCommerce program for its Surgical Eye Care division, with the dual objectives of delivering a best in class customer experience, while streamlining internal processes to reduce manual work.

Challenge 

Under the original platform solution Novartis experienced a 3 to 4 week platform build lead time, delaying the release of important application features and stability improvements. Also, the solution did not satisfy strict security requirements for the pharmaceutical industry. The outcome of these business critical issues was the launch RFP and the section of the UltraServe SmartSack solution.

Solution 

In three months, from July to September 2016, Ultra Commerce used its Platform as a Service (PaaS), SmartStack, with SAP Commerce Cloud on Amazon Web Services (AWS) to launch Novartis’s digital commerce solution. SmartStack offered Novartis the scalability they needed at scale and matched industry required security requirements.

“Clearly experts with Hybris technology and AWS, customer focused and great to work with, the Ultra Commerce team brought much needed stability to the platform.”
– Robin Shah, Head of IT, EMEA Region / Global Head of eCommerce solutions

As Novartis ramped up volumes on SmartStack, Ultra Commerce worked closely with the internal teams providing the necessary environments and expertise to address performance bottlenecks, perform system upgrades and deliver additional capabilities through the regular sprint cycles.

Outcome 

Novartis now has a stable and performant enterprise grade digital commerce solution that meets a strict regulatory framework with the convince of continued integration and continuous deployment capabilities.

“Ultra Commerce met our stringent security standards, and quickly became a trusted partner for our IT and business teams.”
– Robin Shah, Head of IT, EMEA Region / Global Head of eCommerce solutions

The digital commerce program has been a success story for Novartis with over 100% year on year growth equating to circa $300m of business going through the platform in 2018.

Contact an eCommerce expert today to talk in confidence about how we can help you.