Customer Spotlight: How a Global Pharma Company Built an Automation Center of Excellence for Scale

In the pharmaceutical and medical technologies industry, innovation and efficiency are crucial to maintaining a competitive edge. Infrastructure teams at these companies face a major challenge: accelerating service delivery to internal customers for complex, multi-domain services that often require multiple automations.

The story was no different for one of our largest customers — the network team at a major global pharmaceuticals company struggled to scale their automation efforts to deliver the speed and quality the business demanded. Automation was already a key part of their operations, with a robust library of scripts developed by various teams to handle specific tasks. However, these isolated efforts lacked the consistency, scalability, and governance necessary to drive enterprise-wide transformation.

To unlock the full potential of automation, they needed more than just a collection of scripts. They needed a standardized, centralized platform that could unite teams, enhance existing automations, and enable the creation of advanced workflows to orchestrate processes end-to-end. They partnered with Itential and developed a bold, transformative strategy — centralizing expertise and enthusiasm from across different departments to build a Center of Excellence (CoE) that would create an automation-first culture and prioritize collaboration, repeatability, and innovation.

While the organization initially made significant strides with DIY, scripts-based automation, their efforts were limited by several critical challenges:

Fragmented Tools & Teams
Teams across the company relied on different tools and approaches to automation. In addition, while some systems were shared across teams (ITSM, sources of truth), the automations created to interact with them were distinct to each team. This fragmentation resulted in silos and limited the impact of automation across the organization.

Inconsistent Standards & Governance
Due to the fragmented nature of automation across teams, scripts varied in quality and oversight was difficult — creating risk in a highly regulated industry where compliance and security are critical.

Limited Scope
While scripts addressed individual tasks, the organization lacked the capability to connect and orchestrate multiple processes into end-to-end workflows — limiting the impact of automation efforts on the time to complete key processes.

These challenges highlighted the need for a new approach — one that could unify their automation strategy, standardize processes, and empower teams to collaborate more effectively.

To address these challenges, the organization partnered with Itential to establish a Center of Excellence (CoE) and deploy a centralized platform for automation and orchestration. This approach not only unified their existing automation efforts but also provided the foundation for scalable, governed, and repeatable processes.

Key Components of the Solution

1. Centralizing Automation on a Unified Platform
   Itential provided a single platform to consolidate the company’s library of scripts, enabling all teams to access, enhance, and reuse existing automations. Beyond this, the platform offered advanced capabilities to build workflows that orchestrated complex, multi-step processes across systems and teams.
2. Standardizing Automation Across Teams
   The CoE, powered by Itential, established clear standards for automation development, testing, and deployment — capturing their team’s output in releases to track new services, or features, they’re delivering to internal customers. By unifying teams under a consistent framework, the organization eliminated redundancies and improved the quality and reliability of automation outputs.
3. Enhancing Existing Scripts with Extended Functionality
   Itential’s platform enabled teams to leverage their existing scripts while adding new layers of functionality. This extended the value of their prior investments and made it easier to integrate scripts into larger workflows.
4. Connect Automations Through Workflow Orchestration
   The platform allowed the organization to go beyond isolated automations by building orchestrated workflows that connected multiple processes and systems. This capability unlocked new efficiencies and enabled end-to-end automation across the enterprise.
5. Establishing Governance and Compliance
   The CoE ensured that all automation efforts adhered to governance standards, including version control, compliance with regulatory requirements, and alignment with security protocols.
6. Fostering Collaboration & Knowledge Sharing
   By centralizing automation efforts on Itential’s platform, the CoE created a culture of collaboration. Teams could easily share best practices, contribute to a shared library of automation assets, and align on enterprise-wide goals.

By shifting from a siloed approach to a standardized, CoE-driven model, the organization transformed how their network infrastructure can support the business. They’ve centralized automation skills and encouraged greater participation across teams, and they’ve leveraged Itential’s integration and orchestration capabilities to create a standard operating model for building and delivering services across all of their infrastructure.

Today, they’ve scaled their network infrastructure capabilities across their organization, able to deliver services quickly to any consumer in any location. Automation developers benefit from enhanced collaboration and the ability to modify and reuse Itential workflows and workflow components like integrations and data transformations — streamlining the creation of new services over time. Network consumers benefit from the speed and standardization they enjoy by self-serving infrastructure services that are published as Itential workflows and exposed through APIs. And the entire organization benefits from improved governance, standardization, multi-vendor integration capabilities, and accelerated time to value.

One CoE leader shared:

Itential gave us a centralized platform in which we could standardize our automation initiatives across all infrastructure teams and truly build a Center of Excellence model. People who’ve invested into new skills to build automations see more impact from their work, and we can orchestrate across different automation tools and domains to deliver services back to our end users faster and more consistently.

The CoE approach has enabled a radical transformation for the company’s infrastructure. We talk a lot about shifting to a product mindset here at Itential, and that’s exactly what we’re seeing at this organization. When CoE personnel create a new workflow or automation asset in Itential, they publish it as a new feature of the author team — standardized and consumable at scale. This productized approach accelerates infrastructure service delivery and allows network automation personnel to focus their time on higher-priority activities.

If your organization is ready to scale automation and orchestrate processes across teams, Itential can help. With a platform designed for standardization, collaboration, and advanced orchestration, Itential enables enterprises to build a unified automation strategy that drives innovation and growth.

Learn more about how Itential can empower your teams to embrace automation and orchestration at scale here. Or, dive into the full story of how we enabled this global pharmaceutical company to build their automation Center of Excellence here.