C&F

Drug makers, animal health companies and manufacturers with sprawling IT systems are the main customers of this technology consultancy, which says it has more than twenty years of experience and has run IT deployments in over 60 countries. C&F builds data platforms and business applications and puts special weight on life sciences and other regulated sectors.

Services across the data journey

The company groups its work into several areas:

• Data management and engineering: building warehouses and lakes for company data, and the integration and ETL pipelines that fill them.
• Analytics and user experience: data visualisation and reporting designed around how people use it.
• Digital transformation and process automation: AI-based process reengineering, real-time processing and integration, and custom application development and support.
• Data strategy and consulting: reviews of current systems, plans for modernising older applications, and work on data catalogues, discovery and metadata.
• MLOps and DataOps: automating the pipelines that feed machine learning and data delivery.

C&F describes itself as agile in philosophy, which goes beyond project methodology to shape how its teams are set up. It also says it uses proprietary methodologies and industry data models intended to reduce project risk.

Case studies from regulated industries

The case studies on the site show the kind of problem the firm takes on:

• A pharmaceutical group introduced master data management, customer relationship management and enterprise resource planning systems in 2019, which changed its whole IT ecosystem. C&F supplied hands-on expertise to stabilise, harmonise and optimise the newly transformed environment.
• During the pandemic, a global drug maker needed to speed up vaccine production and delivery. The work involved rapidly implementing business applications for an urgent, large-scale operation that could not be interrupted, with software that had to be fully reliable. A related project digitised manufacturing operations through a Digital Operations Center.
• A cloud system for managing scarce national resources such as oxygen and ventilators addressed shortages seen in Germany's first wave of the pandemic.
• An animal pharmaceutical company's slow and inaccurate sales reporting to an international industry survey was made faster and more accurate.

Current themes

Recent material discusses assessing whether a manufacturing network can support the next stage of digital transformation, turning animal health data into decisions, a commercial capability maturity model and a framework for AI strategies, along with a podcast on enterprise innovation. The company says it supplies products as well as services, some of them sold and some used as accelerators, and offers non-stop support for users.