Demerging from a large organisation is always a huge undertaking. It can be deeply complex and challenging if not planned and delivered right. The demerger resulting in the creation of Haleon involved massive IT decoupling and cloud native pivot to streamline legacy infrastructure into an agile consumer-health engine. This was a huge collaborative effort from all teams across Haleon and the wider Asia D&T Team. It was led by Soumya Mishra, played a crucial role in this journey.
Mishra’s educational background is in IT engineering, with a techno-MBA in marketing and finance. Post-university, she was snapped up by IBM. There, she was a business analyst for a technology company. That perfectly suited her studies. From there, Mishra’s skill set took her to Pepsi and Reckitt where she worked across various teams. Eventually, she made her way to the consumer health division of GSK, which spun off into Haleon. When Haleon was born, Mishra took on the mantle of Digital and Tech Head for wider Asia.
“I have my team spread across all the markets in Asia, and we are responsible for supporting business growth with technology enablement,” she explains. “We do strategic projects, and support tech operations and transformations with the global digital and tech teams.”
The First Steps
Haleon is a huge organisation, meaning that separating from a larger organisation is big business. “Figuring it out, planning it, and then carrying it out was a massive challenge for everyone involved.”
As the larger project was unfolding at global level, Soumya and her team planned for wider Asia markets systems on what needed to be cloned, which systems were not needed anymore, and which ones needed a transformation to be cloud native. “After rigorous planning came the phase of building and delivering,” she says. “There was also a major data shift involved. The data is always very critical, and we had to be very thorough to decide what we could take and what we had to archive. Lastly, to make sure everything worked together, we ran rigorous end-to-end testing across systems and countries.”
Reaching the Consumers
Haleon’s Social Impact Health Inclusivity goal aims to empower more people to access better everyday health. To drive this, the company focuses on taking action to address three key barriers: health literacy, health accessibility, and bias/prejudice. To support business in these areas, Haleon works on technology that can help consumers understand – and be aware of – health conditions, and enables them to take timely action and find support.
As an example, Haleon piloted digitalising a publicly-available lifestyle related questionnaire. It assesses everyday lifestyle behaviours which impact health and offers suggestions for well being. Another such initiative was done in India, where Mishra’s team supported the creation of an app to spread awareness on oral health conditions.
“Assisted by a health practitioner, a person can take a photo of the mouth, upload it, and the app tells you what oral ailments you might have. In the pilot trials, it turned out that the majority of the people who used it had some other problem they didn’t know about.”