Stanley H Braxton
SVP Business Insights & Operations
Ashfield Healthcare
Architect of Agile Data Platform
Stanley H Braxton is familiar with solving problems that ultimately enable sales teams to reach their goals. He did so at both AstraZeneca and TAP/Takeda before he joined Ashfield.
For Ashfield Commercial clients, requirements for sales teams might range anywhere from two to 500+ reps for a few months, or a few years, in the field and/or via contact centers. So Stan saw the opportunity to architect a data solution to better serve clients and be as agile as the Ashfield organization. It had to be able to support its varied client needs, turning on and off with contracts, while delivering trustworthy data to drive actionable insights.
Stan assembled a team who worked with his data flow vision of a pyramid structure where the bottom layer behaved as the plumbing, supporting the feed of data such as sales, CRM, and rep feedback. In this layer, data would be scrubbed, managed, validated, and channeled to the next layer of visualization. From this layer, data would flow to the top where actionable insights are sourced. Stan directed the design of each level of the architecture to be partner/platform agnostic so that Ashfield can always adapt to the specific needs of each client.
This data architecture was first built for Ashfield’s Commercial business unit and was implemented initially for a pharmaceutical client with a seasonal product. Until the new architecture, the program had been relying solely on the CRM system to manage the data used to derive insights. For the new system, CRM, sales, and coupon data were among the datasets imported into a structured data warehouse with an added data stewardship process validating and confirming results. With access to structured, quality data, the client was able to confirm field adherence to the selling strategy and course correct as needed to adjust field behavior to best drive performance.
The success of the system Stan architected has led to it also being poised to support Ashfield’s Patient Solutions business unit and Medical Information service. And the architecture can be replicated for each business case, with the appropriate firewalls, giving clients a bird’s eye view and actionable insights derived from the complete data environment.
