They are core to one of the world’s biggest pharma & life sciences firms

Anuprita Bhattacharya is the one in the middle in the picture above. She has reason to hold up that victory sign. She’s the head of the India IT centre for Merck, one of the world’s biggest life sciences and pharma companies, and her teams have delivered projects that have ensured the voices of the India teams are now heard intently in the global CIO’s office.She’s most proud of what she’s done with the company’s Milli-Q lab water purification system. This system is used in laboratories – like the ones that do our blood tests – to remove impurities, and where very high quality water is required. It’s a critical requirement, and yet, traditionally, labs would often fail to replenish the consumables in these systems in time.Anuprita’s team integrated an IoT-enabled smart system in the equipment that would not only alert the lab that they are running out of liquid/chemicals, but also put the item in the cart on the company’s e-commerce site. All that the lab technician has to do is click to buy. “The system estimates the level of liquid, estimates the time it takes to get the liquid, and triggers the reminder,” Anuprita says.They also created a visual aid that provides a step-wise guide to installing the systems containing the liquids, so that the lab did not have to wait for a service engineer. “It saved at least 8-9 man days. Customers loved it,” Anuprita says. It was one of Merck’s biggest product enhancement successes.Another big success was a chatbot that’s now used across the organisation’s different divisions. Merck is a nearly 360-year-old company, and Anuprita’s team had to train the AI system with available data across these centuries. What’s more, it’s a German company, with stringent GDPR data privacy rules. “We needed to ensure a very protected environment. And we did it all within 45 days of ChatGPT coming out,” Anuprita says.Leg up for life scienceAnuprita has a team of about 1,300 – out of the global data, digital and IT team of 2,800. In India, she has two colleagues – Harsha Arora and Suneela Thatte – who lead two other big Merck operations, and we met all of them together the other day in their Bengaluru campus. The Milli-Q product is actually part of the life sciences division that Harsha’s 950-strong team primarily supports. The life science business provides a wide range of products and services for scientific research, biomanufacturing, and applied solutions. Harsha’s team’s job is to look at the competitive environment and identify promising new product areas. They then do feasibility studies.While the actual product development is done by global teams, often in Darmstadt in Germany, Harsha has a strategic marketing and innovation (SMI) team here that helps with the product launch. “We have to meet the compliance regulations in every market. We classify products as dangerous or safe. We do the supply chain and planning. We do the content development for the products. We do the order management, customer query handling, preand post-sales support, and finally the collections from customers,” Harsha says.Helping drug developmentSuneela heads healthcare R&D in India. Merck’s pharma is focused on oncology and neurology, but it also has products in cardiometabolic care and fertility. Suneela’s team helps with every stage of the drug development process – starting with screening of molecules to identify effective candidates for a treatment, all the way to collating data about drugs, checking their safety, preparing documents for regulators. Suneela says her teams here write protocols for clinical trials that need to be submitted to regulators. Every protocol needs to be unique because each drug candidate is unique.Her teams analyse data from clinical trials and prepare reports for regulators. “We have experienced writers in India who know exactly how to do these,” she says.Suneela also has teams that continuously monitor safety of all Merck drugs – those under research, as also those already in the market. “We even have big teams to answer queries that regulators may have,” she says.AI is beginning to come into the workflows of both Suneela and Harsha. Sitting together with Anuprita’s teams is making it much easier for them to create these solutions.-----------------We have voice in CIO's officeWe have shown value from the India centre. We have global roles here, we have leadership here, we have voice in the entire CIO's office. And all of this has been achieved in a very short span, from 2018 to now. Our ambition now is to be innovative enough for our businesses to get solutions that really are future oriented, with technologies like genAI, IoT, machine learning, automation. We want to make Merck’s manufacturing smarter.Anuprita Bhattacharya, Head of Merck IT Center (MITC) and IT Country HeadWe look for gaps in product portfolioWe have 30-40 people in my team who are PhDs and Master’s in chemistry and biology, and their core job is to study our competitive landscape and see if there is a gap as compared to the competitors. They then do the ideation for new product development (in life science areas like lab water systems, filtration products, cell culture media, reagents), they do the feasibility study. Once that’s done and the product is developed by global teams, the SMI (strategic marketing and innovation) team here will help with the product launch.Harsha Arora, Head of Global Enterprise Solutions - Bengaluru Hub We create scientific communications for doctorsOne of the centres of excellence we have built in India is in scientific communications. Our communication is with medical practitioners. So there's a lot of scientific material that needs to be generated – reports of new studies, comparative documents. We have a team of experts who create these scientific communications tailored for the global medical community for Merck’s drugs. Just recently I had two of my team members presenting at ASCO (American Society of Clinical Oncology). They created the information about the oncology portfolio and presented it before all the global oncologists at ASCO. Suneela Thatte, VP & Head of Healthcare R&D, Merck India