Global health leader Bayer is furthering its data-driven strategy by delivering self-service analytics throughout its Consumer Health organization using the capabilities of Databricks’ Unity Catalog on the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform. By bringing together data governance, discovery, and analytics under one platform, the organization is enabling teams around the world to quickly access trusted data and gain insights in a timely manner, all while meeting strict governance and security requirements.
As a global health organization with business operations in many markets and products, Bayer Consumer Health faced the challenge of managing the growing volume of data that existed across regions, systems, and teams. The organization’s legacy architecture also did not allow business users to quickly discover trusted datasets to gain insights without having to rely heavily on the organization’s data engineering teams. To overcome the challenge, Bayer partnered with Databricks to deliver a self-service analytics environment that leverages the capabilities of Unity Catalog, the governance backbone of the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform for the management of enterprise data and analytics assets.
Unity Catalog offers a centralized governance layer that allows businesses to effectively manage permissions, data lineage, and security policies for data and AI workloads. The ability to unify governance and discovery for multiple workspaces has allowed business users, analysts, and data scientists to effectively collaborate with each other while maintaining complete control over sensitive data assets. With this strategy, Bayer has been able to simplify data access for its global teams and enable self-service analytics to minimize the need for centralized data teams.
This process has enabled Bayer Consumer Health to develop a unified data environment that facilitates quick generation of insights, collaboration between business and technical groups, and clear usage of data. It has become easy for analysts to find data sets, understand how the data was created, and utilize it to make business decisions without spending considerable time searching for or validating the data.
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One of the major aspects of this initiative was to develop strong governance while allowing decentralized data ownership. Unity Catalog has enabled domain teams at Bayer to have complete control over their data sets while adhering to centralized governance principles. This has enabled flexibility in innovation with data in different regions while maintaining standardized principles for access, audit, and quality checks.
The platform also enables a new data mesh architecture, in which data is treated like a product and owned by domain teams, rather than IT groups. Bayer Consumer Health’s data architecture, organized in this way, has allowed for improved scalability and agility in its overall analytics ecosystem. This enables a more collaborative culture, in which teams can independently create and share data products.
With the expanded use of Databricks and Unity Catalog, Bayer Consumer Health has effectively democratized data access across its global workforce. Business users can now explore trusted datasets, perform advanced analytics, and build insights-driven strategies without waiting for data engineering teams to provision or prepare data.
This process is enabling Bayer to drive innovation and make better decisions in areas like marketing, supply chain, and product development. The company is laying the foundation for future AI and advanced analytics projects with high-quality and well-governed data through its self-service analytics and strong governance.
Bayer’s case study essentially demonstrates how big global companies can improve their analytics infrastructure to derive more value out of their data. Bayer Consumer Health is using Databricks Unity Catalog as its governance and discovery platform to drive innovation in terms of speed, collaboration, and scalability in its global operations.