Automating Pharma Data Compliance with Azure Services

Situation

A regulated enterprise team of a leading pharmaceutical company was responsible for monitoring compliance and operational metrics by collecting standardized forms from multiple facilities. These forms captured critical production, quality, and compliance information and contained a combination of handwritten and printed data.

The existing process relied heavily on manual data entry into downstream systems, resulting in long processing cycles, limited scalability, and a high dependency on human effort. As data volumes increased, the need for a secure, automated, and scalable digitization approach became essential to support timely decision-making and compliance adherence.

Problem

• Heavy reliance on manual processing of handwritten and printed forms
• Long turnaround time for data availability and reporting
• Increased risk of human error impacting compliance accuracy
• Limited scalability as document volumes continued to grow
• Lack of an automated, end-to-end document ingestion and extraction pipeline

Solution

• Designed a fully automated document processing pipeline using the Azure ecosystem
• Enabled bulk form ingestion from enterprise document repositories into Azure Blob Storage
• Orchestrated workflows using Azure Logic Apps for document monitoring, splitting, and routing
• Leveraged Azure Function Apps to integrate with Azure Document Intelligence for OCR and structured data extraction
• Automated delivery of processed data back to enterprise collaboration platforms
• Adopted a serverless, pay-per-use architecture to ensure scalability, security, and cost efficiency

Impact

• >90% reduction in processing time (from hours to minutes per batch)
• Extraction accuracy rate of 95% by integrating Azure Document Intelligence with validation logic,
• 5x increase in daily document processing capacity without additional headcount
• 30% reduction in operational and IT costs through serverless Azure services
• Improved compliance monitoring and audit readiness through secure, centralized storage in Azure Blob Storage, ensuring traceability and governance of documents and extracted data.