Webinar | How a pharmaceutical company managed their content migration to Veeva Vault successfully

This video directly addresses content migration to Veeva Vault, a leading regulated enterprise content management (ECM) platform within the life sciences industry.ai specializes in the pharmaceutical and life sciences industries, offers Veeva CRM consulting (part of the broader Veeva ecosystem), and focuses on optimizing operations while maintaining regulatory compliance.

This webinar details how Vertex Pharmaceuticals, a biopharmaceutical company, successfully managed a complex content migration project to Veeva Vault RIM. The discussion highlights the transition from traditional, isolated EDMS and registration systems to an integrated, end-to-end regulatory information management platform. Speakers from Veeva and FME (the migration partner) outline the project's approach, timeline, scope, and the significant challenges encountered, such as complicated data mapping, managing two distinct source systems, handling corrupted data, and ensuring rigorous validation in a highly regulated environment. The webinar concludes with practical solutions implemented and crucial lessons learned for future regulated content migration initiatives.

Key Takeaways:

• Strategic Shift to Integrated RIM: The project exemplifies a common industry trend where pharmaceutical companies move from disparate legacy systems to unified, cloud-based platforms like Veeva Vault for comprehensive Regulatory Information Management (RIM), integrating content and registration data for end-to-end visibility and compliance.
• Complexity of Regulated Content Migration: Migrating content in the highly regulated life sciences sector is inherently complex, requiring specialized tools and expertise to address challenges such as intricate data mapping (often due to years of legacy system evolution), diverse source data types, and stringent validation requirements to ensure compliance.
• Importance of Specialized Migration Tools and Expertise: The success of such projects relies heavily on purpose-built migration tools and experienced consultants capable of handling sophisticated data extraction, complex transformation rules (e.g., keyword-based reclassification), and robust validation reporting for regulated platforms.
• Phased Approach for Multi-Source Migrations: A key strategy for integrating data from multiple source systems (e.g., EDMS and a separate registration system) is to load foundational objects (like registration data) first, establishing necessary metadata in the target system before migrating associated documents.
• Critical Project Management & Partnership: Effective execution within tight timelines (e.g., 8 months for design, implementation, and migration) necessitates a strong collaborative partnership between the client, the platform vendor (Veeva), and the migration specialist, emphasizing clear communication and proactive issue resolution.
• Lessons Learned for Optimization: Future migration projects can be optimized by ensuring configuration lock before mapping begins, performing document and object field mapping concurrently, planning thoroughly for renditions, deferring post-validation configuration changes, and allocating sufficient buffer time between production load and business go-live for comprehensive verification and unexpected issues.
• Data Transformation as an Opportunity: Beyond simple migration, the project involved reclassifying content under a more granular and updated document model, demonstrating that migration can be an opportunity for business process improvement and data governance enhancement.