PegaWorld 2025: Roche: Rapid Digital Transformation Through Process Orchestration

PegaWorld 2025: Rapid Digital Transformation Through Process Orchestration

Let's get started, folks. Thank you for coming. Um, and this is the second last session, I believe, between now and Alan's chess game, which I would recommend that you go witness if you haven't done so far. Um, yesterday, I don't know how many of you saw on the main stage montage Pega announced some winners, individuals as well as customers in various categories.

Roche was awarded the Innovation Award for Healthcare and Life Sciences this year. And and it was an award that, you know, I was part of the committee. We had a tough choice, but it was for their strategic vision of a platform that serves the entire value chain of their pharmaceutical business. Right.

And who better to explain and get an insight into this Cloud platform that is a digital transformation platform for Roche with process automation. Who better than the owner and the leader of that initiative, my close friend Sebi. Nathan take away sir. Thank you Salil, I hope all of you can hear me well thank you.

So before I go into the session, I'll also introduce myself again. I just want to get some logistics out of the way. So last week I was talking to a colleague of mine. He knew I was going to present here, and he said, how's your presentation going already? And I said, yeah, ready? And then he went, do you have jokes in it?

And I said, no. And he's like, do you want me to help you add some jokes? I didn't know joke was a thing, so I want to get that very clear. No jokes. None at all. Very serious. Um, I hope I said that right, I was leaving. You can stick on. I know it's the second last before the chess game. I know the second day it's post noon.

We'll try to make this as engaging as possible. And so one of the things we'll do is you'll see a slide. I do have quite a bit of slide presentation, but I'm not going to take a lot of your time in the hopes that you can ask me questions. So I'll do maybe 15, 20 minutes of the presentation and the rest of the time ask me any question.

We can have a conversation. If you don't have any questions, then chess game is much more closer. All right. Thank you. For those who just joined us, I'll introduce myself again. Um, firstly, good afternoon, all of you. I'm. My name is Nathan. Everybody calls me Seb, so feel free to do that if you find me in the corridor or anywhere else.

I'm a product manager for process and robotics orchestration at Roche. I will also give you a brief on what is Roche and what we do. Um, today I'm thrilled to be part of this PegaWorld, particularly this one this year. I've been to many PegaWorld before. Um, it's always a fantastic opportunity to meet people, but this one, particularly because it's a very focused I think it's very focused on fintech.

It's very focused on AI. So there seems to be a lot more structure to what's being discussed here. And I hope to add some parts of how we are leveraging some of that, not necessarily in the AI space, but pre AI era of what we have done so far, and then how this AI boom is going to impact and accelerate that.

But particularly I'm also happy to be here because there are our ex-partners, people who have actually who work with us today that are some of our customers, all of them here. So what I'm going to represent is not just mine, it's all of us and what we have done. So without further ado, let me take my clicker and start going through.

Um, you can see the slide there. I see it here. So I'm going to look at this slide. That's fine. Okay cool. So let me start with what we're going to do. I already gave you I said without much further ado. So this is a bit more ado. Uh, strength and capabilities of Pega is something we will be focusing on with specific relevance to what we did at Roche.

So this could be different from how other customers have done it. But we found value in particular capabilities, particular strengths of the Pega Platform itself. So I'll dive a little deeper into that. We will also go detailed take a look at three use cases. Right. And why three use cases and how many more we have.

Again I will speak about that as well. But these three are key because they come from three different business domains within our organization. And then I'll speak about the power of unified platform, which is the core of what we do at Roche, which is, I'm told, is the reason why we won the award as well.

So I can speak a little about what we do and how we continuously see value. And then a bit of looking ahead and what that means. What are we doing with Pega going forward? All right. Um. About me. I don't know if you need an about me anymore, but I. So I'm the product manager for process and robotics orchestration.

What that means? Maybe I'll introduce a little there. Um, so I have platforms that focus on process management, and process automation is one aspect of it. Pega plays a very key role in that particular aspect of process automation. So we do end to end process automation with Pega. And when we dive deeper into the use cases, you will see more of that.

And based in Indianapolis, Indiana. Introduction to Roche. So who are we? For those who are less familiar, Roche is a leader in healthcare and life sciences, headquartered in Basel, Switzerland. It's a beautiful place. Our core mission is to improve patient outcomes through continuous innovation, and that means constantly seeking out the best of technologies.

Digital transformation isn't just a buzzword for us. We have to live it. And how do we do that? It's a strategic imperative that we constantly seek out the best. We leverage cutting edge technologies to drive efficiency and enhance decision making across our organization. Beyond scientific achievements.

Roche is a big sponsor of sustainability, and that's something we. Sorry, I clicked it a little further. There we are. Sustainability and corporate responsibility is very key. That is that is one of our core values at Roche as well given our operation. As you can see, we are headquartered in Basel, but our operations span almost all countries, so it spans multiple geographies and business units.

Managing scale and complexity is very key. And for that, we are constantly looking at what are the robust and scalable technologies Pega comes right in for that. Okay, now let's talk a little about Pega at Roche and the role it plays. This is high level. And the next slide I will dive deeper into the use case.

So Pega is not just any other vendor for us. It is a core platform. It enables global digital process solutions, digital transformations and advanced automation solutions. And all of these words are not just words because they sound nice. We actually have positioned the Pega platform to address the most complex of business cases at Roche.

And there's a strict positioning to that too. Not that we cannot build simple workflows. We found the most value building the highly complicated business cases that are close, business critical, high value with Pega. And in the long run, we've seen that payoff. We've pushed Pega beyond traditional applications.

It's deployed across various business units and business functions for a comprehensive workflow automation solution, we leverage the case management, the the decision management and workflow automation. So the primary positioning is workflow automation, right? Anything that has a workflow needs to go through.

Some go through goes through an assessment for Pega. And then we assess that based on the complexity. Like I earlier mentioned the more complex we love it. So if somebody says we don't know how to tell our problem, we're like, yeah, that's exactly where we can help you. So we have and now with Blueprint, I think that's going to be a lot more easier.

And we're starting to leverage that. But we did this even prior to. So there was a lot of manual effort going in, sitting in sessions and workshops with simply getting that translated into a technical document or a technical form that we then build it once they are live often and some of the use cases you will see, so you will understand what I exactly mean when we please be patient with that when we go to the next slide.

But the idea was always if this is where the strength of Pega is, if this is able to orchestrate multiple roles, different personas, different geographies, different languages, helps in localization and scale. Why should we go small? Why should we look at what's the simplest and just build everything?

Because clearly you shouldn't build everything as well, right? In one solution. All right. I think we can move. Strengths of the platform. I hope all of you here are familiar with this already, but allow me to please go through some of them that have been very key to our success. And I'll quickly move over to the use cases as well.

So if we dive deeper into the core strengths of Pega Platform, what stands out to us is its centralized architecture. It's perfectly designed to solve complex problems. All of the things that I mentioned earlier. It's again, the case management is where the core is. That's the strength of Pega that we leverage.

We do not do Customer Decision Hub. We do not have any customer facing or customer interaction modules. Yet at Roche we do not. We've not positioned it for that yet, But where we do then use is the case management. So workflow management, as I mentioned, one of the other core elements that has been super useful for us is the build.

Once deploy multiple times, almost all of the high value driving applications on Roche are all scaled. They they they are in multiple countries. They built ones. They continue to be developed as. And when we speak one of the use case, I will I think the next one, you will see that that goes beyond 70 countries in less than two years.

And that was possible because of Pega's inherent architecture. So we didn't have to do much with it. We didn't have to play around with it. We just took what Pega was good at, leveraged it in the right manner, and got the value we had to get. Use case won the global event management solution. This is one.

This was known by different names within Roche, but this is the global event management solution that's built on Roche. Let me give you a brief before moving over. So why did I choose this? Because we have 70 plus applications at Roche today. That's business facing that we use internally. Some of them are external.

So because our when we say external it's often healthcare professionals and patients. So we are also very sensitive about the user interaction they have about how, how do we make their life a little more easier and not add a technical barrier when they're submitting a form, for example, somebody who's going through a clinical trial.

So there's that. Whereas here, this this particular solution is not very external facing. It's primarily used internally to manage all our global event management systems. It does sometimes have HTTP access right now. Why that's important. You will know when I go again a further deeper into it. What does the solution aim to do.

So the solution aims to orchestrate a harmonized end to end process for managing all meetings, events, engagement alongside general consultancy grants, sponsorships and donations. A quick note here. When I say meeting it's events. It's not the fund meeting and events, it's the health meeting and events.

So it's the health events where you're getting physicians and sometimes patients are part of it. So it's very business critical too. And this so because of all of the items I said so earlier, let me repeat that. So general consultancy grants, sponsorship and donations, all of those existed even before the app.

This is very key to what we do at Roche. However, they were all siloed. The grants and sponsorship was taken care by one team in a different part of the world. Donations somewhere else. Events were handled in three different systems. What we did was bring all of this together into one platform. Does that mean we got rid of everything else that was critical?

No. And that's the beauty of Pega and the Center-out architecture. I'll go deep into that. We still have them, but Pega accelerates it. Pega brought everything together, with the user experience being very, very simple. So this is a quick sample look on what we do. So before Rome, like I said, the engagement and management was super fragmented.

We lacked a unified solution, relying heavily on disparate systems and manual Excel tracking. There were about 80,000 sheets of documents being processed every month, and almost half of it was manual. There was somebody hired. There was a team hired whose job was to just go through it, tally it, make sure everything's being tracked.

All right. What does that lead to? Why is that a problem? I mean, beyond the effort and the cost, this also leads to compliance problems. And we are in a highly regulated industry. Building compliance systems, building processes that are compliant are very key. Again, Pega is what we leveraged to do that.

So the solution today which is called it's called Rome and Pega Roche Roche meeting and events. It creates a truly seamless user experience with one unified solution. It orchestrates activities across in-country, above country and cross border processes. It ensures consistency globally. So now there are no multiple processes. There is one process but multiple user experiences depending on where they are. So China somebody in China has a separate experience. They see it differently. They have a different workflow. But the standards are the same compared to somebody in Germany or somebody in the US. Rome evolved from what was called Idms and IBM's evolved from what was called Rems.

And this is a clear example of how we use the situational Layer Cake and how the scalability happened. It started off with one app, one country in the Europe. They saw value and they said, oh, maybe we should do this in three other countries. Let's do Italy, France, Switzerland. Cool. We built that out.

They're like, oh, this is great. Maybe this should be a Europe solution. And then it becomes a Europe solution. And now it's a global solution. And so of course the teams have increased, the scale has increased, but the amount of automation and the scalability and all of this happened in the last three years.

And this particular solution, Rome, the way it is built today, It went live in 40 plus countries last year. It's scheduled to go live in 80 plus countries next year, and it's already almost production ready in 70 plus countries. That is the amount of activity and ability within within this Pega Platform.

And no, there's not 100 people working on this. There's maybe 30 people as a team just dedicatedly working on this. And this is one of the 70 solutions we have at Roche. Second is patient access program. Now this is very different from the previous use case you saw because the previous came from the commercial domain.

This was that was about facilities. That was about maintaining data compliance here. It's much more close to patient access. And this is very, very critical as you can imagine because it's also a compassionate use program. So that is what our program runs on this. And I will explain a little on what that is.

This is a compassionate use program which is very core to Roche. So this is accessed by patients in countries where they where they cannot afford medical care or they do not have it as a system. Some countries like Africa. So what Roche does is Roche holds camps and possibilities, opportunities for patients who usually terminally ill, with very little chance of survival to participate and get the life saving drug that could be in trials or that has been cleared.

So this is an opportunity. So physicians go there, they camp out, they meet with people. They enter the values and details in it. They send it out. And if there's a drug that has been identified that could save them, it gets shipped. I will explain the workflow and then I will tell you the impact we've had.

If it's not on this slide, I will call that out. So here's the detail of of the same workflow that I said, but in a much more better manner. So like I said, Pairs manages pre-approval access, compassionate use access and post-trial access programs. This was extremely cumbersome. You can imagine the amount of people and the amount of time this would have taken before we had a system in place.

So just walking you through that workflow. A person, a physician, enters something. This was usually a manual form. He would type it on his computer, print it out, mail it, and there'll be a there'll be a person carrying this mail around. He would post all of that that will go into a factory. Of course, after all the approvals that it needs to into a place where the drug is manufactured, all the compliance checks, work gets done, they pack it, put it in a box, ship it out to the ship it out to the patient.

It used to take four months roughly on average for this, for this entire process to complete. Where are we today? I will tell you, but let me go a little more on the workflow. So the manual process was absolutely prone to error. It caused confusion. And most critically it resulted in significant delays, like I said, for months.

And so what's the ideal time? It's usually hours or days because these are people who have been written off by the existing medical, um, with whatever medical innovation that has already happened. So this is their last. Sometimes the patients are often and this is an information that I got as a tidbit, which was very, very eye opening for me.

That added purpose to what I do is that I heard well, I understood, not heard as in hearsay. The data says that almost 70% of people who actually use this are kids, our kids who are under five. So it's often the kids who cannot be treated with the drugs we already have who get enrolled into this. So even one life saved.

And if we can do anything there, that's a tremendously impactful use case. So we built this out in Pega and so Pega what it helped was absolutely the scalability. The solution was designed to automate the entire process. So the entire end to end, from the time the physician enters the form to the time, the acknowledgment of a drug being received by this person, and then post what happens, they can even record if they're if they're improving, if there's no improvement.

And that constant feedback, all of that today is managed on the Pega Platform as one of our applications. Um, so what what did what's the impact? Well, we reduced time from months to days and in some cases, hours. And so there's tremendous success stories of people receiving life saving drugs, especially kids, like I said.

And there's a beautiful video, which we use internally at Roche of a mother explaining how her how her four month old baby was saved because they received the drug in four days, and the doctor said if she had gotten it in seven days, the kid would have passed away. So all of all of everybody who's in the technology space, we use that to show the value of what technology can do to business and the core, especially here with this Pega use case.

So as you can see, the metric there, 28,000 patients served, 1000 plus daily users, including 500 plus healthcare professionals. So you can see it's a 50 over 50. So it's healthcare professionals and patients who use the system. Use case number three. Now we go into a completely different zone. So this is research request and fulfillment.

Roche is very heavy on research. We are in fact um, don't quote me on this, but but this is there are statements that Roche is the highest in research that we invest the most. And if you Google it, yes, it does show Roche, but I've not gone into the papers. But if you google which organization invests most in research, you'll see Roche.

And this is one of the systems that does that for our wing called Genentech in the US, which is a Roche subsidiary. Research request and fulfillment. Let me give you a little about it before going into the details. So I don't get this wrong. And some of these use cases are very specific. So I look at my notes for that. So powers is what this is called. And what is parse. Parse is protein antibody research science. So that is one of the apps. There are many many workflows. There are many research that happens within Genentech as one of the organization. This one particularly why it's interesting is because this was one of the first workflows that we built on Pega in 2018, and there are people who worked on it, possibly here too, from our partners and so on.

This was built out of the North America because Genentech is based here in the US. Protein antibody research was one of the first. And then there are multiple workflows that were built on top of it, up to up to, I think 12 to 13 workflows. So 13 applications that the team then eventually built and evolved.

So the system supports antibody and protein production in various expression systems. Right now here's a bit of again an impact. And I will walk you through where this was before. Prior to we building this in a system. So previously our research and early development workers faced numerous challenges in managing requests for antibodies and communications.

Now who are our users and scientists? Often these are people who don't. Who just who are researchers who are again time bound to research. They see something. They want to capture it. They want that data to be processed. They don't want to have the difficulty in figuring out where to write it down, how this gets processed, and so on.

So they they struggled with fragmented communication, inefficient tracking of request difficulties, capturing vital assay data and results if one research happens and if they have a finding and if there's a delay in writing it down, what happens is they have to redo that research because that data is then not relevant if it's not captured in a particular amount of time.

Manual labeling of samples was a problem. There was a lack of support for automation. Sample management process was a mess. It was very complicated. There was no proper auditing. The old system was characterized by siloed approaches. There was heavy reliance on Google Sheets where a Google first company.

So our product is Google, Google Sheets. There were a ton of Google Sheets that was meant to be record keeping for these apps. What are some capabilities is what I want to talk about quickly, before talking about what we have done with it and what the benefits are that we reaped with Pega. So the Pega based PA solution specifically was built to address these solutions, these issues, the issues that I spoke about, fragmented communication, the not having the ability to capture data and so on.

But it also ended up centralizing the protein antibodies fulfillment system. So it basically helped us create a full on fulfillment management system to do the entire process. It accommodates up to 15 to 20 different request pathways on protein type. It now manages incoming requests intelligently. It assigns tasks to the right people.

It tracks the workload. It does communication not just within the application, but also to users outside who needs to be aware of it through through the various ways that Pega allows us to with the multi-channel approach. It also helps the Contract research organization, which is an external organization, to have a communication with the application.

So the application now there is not a need for anybody to keep a track of the data and then send it out to these important organizations that regulate the industry. Status updates are obviously very clear. And this is again timely. The clearly defined workflow steps are visible to all users and fulfill us.

So if I need to know who's the next in the workflow, it's very visible. This was not something that was available before. In the manual process, you would do your task and you would hope everything else gets done in time. And you didn't have the visibility today. Anybody who's working on that application knows exactly what steps the workflow has gone through, what you're spending.

So if something's not right, the system finds it, but also the user can user can see that, oh, my manager is not here. Maybe this should get assigned to somebody else. System's going to do it. But the user can also see it. And this integrates seamlessly with the Roche inventory and the database systems.

There's again clear efficiency and communication as one of the core problem that addresses that. The case management capability addresses real time tracking, streamlined workflows. It ensures nothing falls off the tracks. Now I so there was one. I asked the team, the particularly the users of this app, what is their favorite feature?

And they told me something I want to share that interestingly, the most favorite feature for the scientist who use this application is Pega Pulse. I would not have thought that that is what they would say because previously before this was set up, if you asked them, they would say everything I said as a problem, they would say, oh, there's no auditing, there's no tracking, I don't know.

That was not the problem. And then I thought their favorite would be, oh, we have great. Everything's working out. Like, no, they said our favorite is Pulse. And I said, how about the other things like. And they're like, yeah, no, that's fine. That's absolutely fine. And that's very interesting. I don't know how many of you here use Pega Pulse to be honest.

We don't use Pega Pulse you do it perfect day in and day out. It's actually super effective if you figure out how to use it. And if you have the right mindset in using it and you have the right training. So that's something we do, which is also one of the reasons why I pulled this out, because scientists saying Pega Pulse shows how important communication is for them, not just from a system perspective, but human to human interaction.

They want the ability to be able to ping somebody and ask something quick within the system. They don't want to keep switching tabs. Now that is given, Roche has almost all the messenger tools out there as well. And yet they request and they highlighted this as something. And I thought it's worth sharing it with all of you here.

Now this is I've already spoken about the crows. And so this shows Pega's ability in adapting to the need. Right? I chose three. One of the reasons my title of this talk was Rapid Development was not necessarily to talk about speed. I know it can get misconstrued as speed. I mean, yes, it is fast. Not not not talking about that, but particularly saying that we use the platform today on building 70 different applications across the different business functions.

So it's not just one department using it. It's not it's not our commercial app. It's not our science. The same platform on which a scientist uses this to record research assay is the same platform on which the commercial organization sets up event. It's the same platform on which we have diagnostic workflows running.

It is the same. Until last month. Until last. About three months ago. Taiwan. Roche Taiwan used Pega for their absence marking tool. Why not? But that ability, that adaptability of Pega and the way we've positioned it to specifically address business complexities through this feature, I think that's very key.

And that is why I titled it rapid, because we're not saying, oh, you're from HR, you're from the HR department. Sorry, Pega can't help you. No, we can build whatever you want to build, and that is very key. So which is why I chose these three. Also being mindful of the time. And like I said, it's the second one.

Didn't want to bore you with anything more. So let's talk a little about this unified platform. Situational Layer Cake is something I've addressed. These specific use cases that I chose demonstrate the power of unified platform. If you have questions, if there's more time, I'm happy to address this in further detail as well.

The reusability feature is one of the key. When I talk about unified platform we have. So my team, particularly the team that reports to me, we have one of our core missions is to build as many reusable components as we can. So what's a reusable component? A reusable component for us is anything that we think will be a standard or valuable for any application that is being built.

Single sign on, for example, or that's very simple. Every every app on the organization by mandate needs to have single sign on. That's the only authentication. Why do we want every team to build one on their own? So we built we built it as a reusable component. They copy it to the application layer.

They have single sign on. We have 30 plus reusable components built like that starting from, like I said, so to e-signature to sometimes even full application frameworks. If one research organization we have multiple if one research organization has built an app, and then there's another research organization within Roche that's trying to solve a similar problem, they can we can always put that into a reusable component so they get maybe 50 to 60% of the work already done.

That is very key. And what powers that is something that we are all familiar with is Pega Citi Layer Cake. So we absolutely followed that process and the architecture of maintaining that situation. Layer Cake, which is how our guardrails are set up, which is how our architecture guidance guidelines are set up.

We train any new partner we work with in following those guidelines and acknowledging those guidelines to enable us to continue to be those unified platform. Unified platform does not mean we have only one instance. That's not what this means. We have multiple production instances depending on how many apps there are, what they particularly do, which is there a particular regulation?

Is there are they from a particular country and so on. But the platform doesn't change when we upgrade. We upgrade all instances when we do a change, that change goes out to across. So our change management is also tied to always living this vision of making it unified. That also means refactoring. That also means when anything needs to change at an enterprise level, it's very seamless.

Seamless, not from a change perspective, but more from the adaptability perspective. We're not having to raise multiple change. We're not having to track multiple. It's just one. And we announce the communications become very simple when we say, hey, Pega Platform is getting this change. Everybody knows it.

All of the thousands of users who use it know that that's a change. And then as a particular app owner or an app person, they know the change that needs to be done. So we also fully embrace Pega's vision of Center-out. Not all of our apps are built as a Center-out, but this is something we're continuously trying to leverage now from the earlier event management system I mentioned is also a perfect example of how Center-out works.

Now, I said end to end workflow. That does not mean Rome is a standalone app. Rome continuously integrates with 40 other solutions. Many of them are full blown applications or solutions that we have at Roche, and many are external too. But Rome sits in the center. It's in the heart of this entire workflow, orchestrating it.

Users login directly to Rome. But in the cases where they say there is a procurement application that it plays with, somebody, logs in there and makes a change room, gets updated with that too. So it's truly the brain of what we call the event management system and hence the name. The Roche event management system is built on Pega.

But there are multiple complementary systems that's helping it. So that's that's a perfect example there too. All right. We can move on to the next one then. What are some challenges. Okay. So now I spoke about all the good things we did with this. Was it a cakewalk? Absolutely not. We started a journey in 2017 with just one app specifically built for one country.

That app today doesn't exist. They didn't need the app after a while, but we built 70 plus applications over the last few years. So from 2017 to now. And how was that? How easy was that? It was a journey. It was a journey. It was a continuous learning with Pega as partners and with our implementation partners, because we also work with external partners and our internal team.

One of the things we've constantly had to navigate was the frequency of updates. We all know Pega is updating constantly, which is a good thing, but that also means there is a change that we have to go through now, given how mission critical some of our apps are. And I only mentioned three. So imagine the scale and there's many more in the pipeline.

If we are introducing downtimes, if we're introducing constant change, if somebody goes live after six months of development and they're doing a very mission critical work, let's take pairs, for example, and we go and tell them, hey, now you're ready. It's supercharged. You can do your workflow. They're like, yeah, this is great.

We just reduced the time from four months to four days. I can dismantle my team. And how many people do I need for support? And we'd have to say, well, hold on, hold on. We are upgrading. Like, can you, can you slow that a bit? So it was kind of counterintuitive. So we worked with Pega over the years.

And of course Pega we've tried to always embrace the change. We've always tried to be n minus one. So we're always in the latest version minus one. So we are on 24 right now and we are fully Cloud. That has also helped us navigate some of the change here. Patch updates have gotten a lot better. It's almost seamless.

There's no downtime to it, and we've had very little trouble. Upgrades have gotten better too, so the entire upgrade experience has has become better. But this was something that we had to work through while. So it was not just had a mission and we went and accomplished it. It was constantly it's still a journey.

Infrastructure, dependencies. Um, when I put this on, even I got a question for my team as well. They said it is true, but aren't we fully on cloud? Like, why should we be having infrastructure dependencies as a question? Because they realize that's true. We do spend quite a bit of time on this. And that, I think, speaks to the reality of when we say cloud or when we say AI, that sometimes we take it at face value and we think it's a magic pill that's going to solve all the problem.

Our experience has been slightly different. We've always had the support of Pega in working through all of this. And yet we've had some troubles. Because we are a regulated industry. We have systems that are particularly in-house only, which means they are. This Pega, which is on Cloud, needs to speak to an internal to Roche system only.

And then there are VPCs that are connectivity. So there's a lot of networking that happens, not stuff we want to deal with, but we have to deal with. And that is something that we've also had to depend on. And then something similar like Gmail. So what about the changes that Pega doesn't bring in that we don't, but the other third party or other tools that we depend on, we all have Gmail.

I hope all of you have some sort of mail configuration either iMap what what what happens when that changes or what happens when AWS introduces a change. How do we manage that? So if you put all of that together, that's a lot of change. And that I think having a plan to navigate that change, having a plan and a partnership, building that partnership with Pega and the other teams in knowing and understanding that these are some of the essentials.

These are more like a mandate that we have to have in order to do what we do. Has been a learning. It's been a it's been a journey as well. And then the last one is caps in skill sets. Pega introduces a lot of cool things. We're really excited. Everybody hears it. We want it like Agentic AI. And then we go speak to our partners and sometimes they're like, oh, we need some more time to learn it.

Because yeah, there is a constant learning curve. Technology these days, especially in the last two years, has been growing at a rapid speed that we wake up one day and we see a news and then two months later, it's already perfect. It's not even beta. It's like released. All of you pretty much here have ChatGPT and stuff on your phone.

Three years earlier this was on the news. This was like Bitcoin in the early days. We're like, we don't know who's going to use it. This looks cool. Someday somebody will tell us that someday and somebody has been so rapid. So if we still wait to assess use cases that are business critical, develop them and deploy them and say it takes a year to do it.

The problem that they were addressing would have been resolved automatically just by time. And so how do we have partners? Then there's also in-house. How do we have skill set that can match the momentum and the speed. That's that's something we're still navigating. Looking ahead. So when I submitted the slide we were upgrading to 3.0.

Happy to say we completed the upgrade two weeks ago. So we are successfully on Cloud 3.0 again speaking to my earlier slide. Stuff like this is something that we always try to be on the latest. We're looking forward to having much more stable cloud platform with this. It's super interesting on how cloud works. It's entirely on Kubernetes. That gives us the ability to take advantage of all the features that come with that. There's further leveraging of intelligent automation and decisioning. So we are looking into AI. We are looking into all of the new changes that's coming up, but also taking it one step at a time because our core, like I said, has been the business value.

So we're trying to understand how do we address this change, how do we be in the front but but not allow for the business value to get diluted? How do we connect both. That's very key. So that's something that is in our roadmap and continuous innovation. Of course we're deeply committed to further our automation pipeline automation capabilities with Pega features.

Even the existing ones are super powerful as you have seen. Um, and we want to continuously do that. We are also looking into some of the decisioning capabilities which we haven't fully explored, and that's something we'll be looking at. And what do we have Q&A. I don't know if I stuck to time as I committed, I may have I didn't I took almost the entire hour.

But I guess we have Q&A. Any questions? Yeah. Wonderful. That was. Amazing. Could you turn the mic on, please? Thank you. Any questions from the audience, please step up to the mics. We have two up in the aisle. This was an amazing sharing of your journey. CB 70 plus applications across you know your entire value chain.

How did you come up with the adoption of that across your business segments? You know, and get the buy in from all these business stakeholders? I come up with some, you know, initial resistance. I'm sure you had some resistance from your business stakeholders. How did you go about that? Thank you. That's a good question because that's absolutely true.

That's one of the first things we face is it's not easy to scale because we didn't have a mandate. We didn't have a top down mandate saying everybody needs to get on Pega. Nope, that's not how Roche works. That's not how we do. The key is for us to identify one app that was that is how we began, like I said, with one app.

But the key was what is the problem we're trying to solve? There were no commitments to Pega. There were no commitments to our business or anybody saying this is what we will do. We took our time making this into an enterprise solution. It was only after, I think, 7 or 8 apps were live, and the value was very obvious that then once the value is obvious, I think it becomes easy.

So even today we have such a strict positioning for Pega that when business comes to us and says, hey, we want to build something on Pega. The first thing we say is let's assess it. We don't say, go ahead and build it. We say, let's assess it. Let's capture what is the value that you get. And interestingly for us, which I hope was was clear from my presentation, is that the business value is so different.

It's vastly different from each business function. For patient this could be the enrollment rate of patient. So we need to capture that and say okay what are we actually doing here. Why do you need the system. What is your workflow look like and how can Pega help. Whereas for somebody else it could just be speed to market.

But if we say, hey, Pega is great for speed to market, do you want to enroll a few patients? That would be absolutely like completely out of not not relevant at all. And so we're very closely watching that we are always looking for what is business critical items? What are we? What are we trying to target? What are we trying to solve and then build it? To answer a question on adoption, there's always friction because there is always questions about why Pega is it complex? Because that's a word that's easily misunderstood. They think it's complex. We're like, no, no, no, they can solve for complexity is different from it's complex.

And it's also a relative term. What does complex mean for one could mean simple for somebody else. So we constantly work with them. We co-create with users. That's what we do. We don't. It's not just having a platform and giving them access. We co-create the work. So up until pre-prod, we are absolutely with them in multiple steps.

We have very clear architecture guidelines, governance models, all of that. And then we pretty much almost provide a white glove service. Given that you have 60 or 70 odd applications, how is your integration landscape? Because you are operating out of Europe, you're operating out of us. I'm pretty sure there is GDPR requirements that you have data sharing.

How do you manage your integration stack? Given the scale of your applications and the number of systems that each of them will have to speak across these geographies? Yeah. It's complex. So his question was about integration landscape and how are we managing that given the difference. Completely very different compliances that we have and the ever changing compliance landscape as well.

Um, it's not easy. So what we do, which is also why we look, like I said, the assessment phase and the co-creation. We have a validation team. We have a compliance audit. Roche who defines what the criterias are for compliance in the integration landscape? We have dedicated integration team that takes care of.

We have Jason here who leads the integration team as well. So there's a dedicated team, the set of people. We work very closely with them in defining what could what this means for us. If there are blockers that we identify early on, we try to solve them. If there's a technical blockers, we do that.

We have a repository of what our compliance records are. To be very honest, that does slow us down. But I the way I see it, I don't think it's slowing us down. I think that's the time it takes, right? Like we can build an app in today. But if we need two weeks to deploy it because we need to get everything right, we wait.

And that's something we set as an expectation to business already. So if they come to us and say, hey, can you help us build something? We have the budget, let's just go. We want to go live in three months. We outright say, well, that depends on what compliance and what regulatory needs need to be checked.

So we're very, very clear on that. So it's complex but we navigate it's a it's a collaboration. Any other questions. One final one from me. CB you are very candid in sharing some of the challenges. And for folks that have worked with Pega for a long time, yes, upgrades were a challenge. Now, the one thing that I liked about Roche is they are always current in the technology and what you've heard and seen in the last couple of days, you know, technology has leapfrogged and unless we stay current with the platform, we are not able to harness all of the value that we heard over the last couple of days.

And this Cloud 3.0 Platform that CB referenced brings all of this agentic capability into the cloud platform. So everything that you heard, you know, all those AI agents, the conversational agents, the automation agents, obviously the Blueprint design agent, but all of those agents now can be seamlessly harvest on the cloud 3.0 platform.

So that's I think is a great strategy is to stay current. You know, even if it's n minus one, then you can really harness the capability of what the platform brings to you. So appreciate everything that you've shared. CB thank you. This was wonderful. Oh one more. Yeah. Thank you. I'm just curious as I'm curious as to I know that you're on most current version or close to that.

How many of the newer applications that maybe we've seen this week are you using? Constellation. Blueprint. Like how many of those have you started to apply, given that you've been in this Pega journey for so many years, I know it's a larger transition to some of the newer stuff. Cool. Thank you. So, um, Blueprint is something we've started to integrate tremendously into the new use cases that we.

So almost all of the new use cases being assessed has Blueprint. We have a legacy transformation program going on at Roche, which is also assessing use cases that may land in Pega. But regardless of where it lands, we're using Blueprint to assess and understand what the workflow is, especially in cases where there are no clear app owners.

So these are tools from legacy applications that we want to get rid of. But then who's going to explain to us what the workflows. So we use Blueprint there. We use screenshots. We use it's not yet adopted in a manner we would like it to be because also Blueprint is evolving, but we tremendously use it and we found it very, very useful.

A lot of conversation over the last few days that we've had here is on the impact of Blueprint and what it can do for Roche going forward as well. Constellation all of our new apps are built on Constellation. So we are we are readied on the platform. We've not adopted for the existing because migration is a larger process.

And like I said, we're very mindful of introducing continuous change. Um, but yeah, that's something we're actively exploring as well. So one question. You mentioned the reusable components. That's something I think it's very important and very valuable. I would like to understand during this journey with Pega think you should have, um, a lot more reusable components now.

Has that helped you to increase, um, or let's say reduce your time to market for the new applications which are now being developed? Absolutely. It's reduced the development time. In fact, we get requests from folks now from the business team saying, hey, so there is one big app which we are use case, which will turn into an app very soon.

I say big as in it's very complex. In the business case, it's multiple geographies and all of that. One of the first things they asked was, is there a is there a reusable component on app we can reuse? And I told them, who told you that? Like who said who told who gave you this information about reusability.

And he said oh no. We looked it up on Pega on our internal confluence page, and we speak about reusable reusability as a thing. And they said that that was an attractive factor. And so he wanted to know what we can do. And so we sent it out and they came back with their assessment, not our assessment.

And they said, this is great. This reduces 40% of our effort. I'm yet to see what it is that they found in that. But we have so many of them. So reusability absolutely reduces the development time. It helps get buy ins. To answer your question earlier. It helps convince folks and saying that if you had to build this custom even on Pega, this is what it would take.

But now, because you're on a platform that's already mature, that has a backing, that has a team that knows what to do, it reduces time. So it's dad's business value there too. Thank you very much. Thank you all. Have a good day. Bye bye.