BioMarin: Standardizing PromoMats
for Speed and Scale

As biopharma organizations grow, many begin to rely on customization in the content supply chain to accommodate diverse regional needs and increasingly complex workflows. Yet, customization often creates unforeseen administrative burdens and organically extends content cycles.

Pioneering companies like BioMarin proactively choose to standardize. Using industry best practices, the content team has carved out space to accelerate content delivery, build confidence in global scaling, and simplify system integrations.

Standard PromoMats configuration now positions BioMarin to seamlessly adopt AI in medical, legal, and regulatory (MLR) review. The company is poised to expedite MLR reviews to meet changing customer needs, help relieve reviewer burnout, and build the organizational trust needed to tackle these ambitious digital transformation goals.

“We set out with the intentional goal of creating more green space for our teams. By standardizing, we didn’t just fix a process — we engineered a foundation that allows us to innovate and scale globally without hesitation.” — Tom Zito, Associate Director, Global Content Management Operations, BioMarin

Customization slows the content life cycle

Biopharma companies often turn to customization for understandable reasons:

• Using software to mirror entrenched manual approval processes
• Granting brand or regional requests for unique fields, routing paths, and review steps
• Supporting bespoke tagging taxonomies across life sciences brands and regions

BioMarin’s journey reflects these common biopharma industry trends. “In exploring our technology configuration, I noticed multiple subregional processes,” says Chris Lozinak, principal of Veeva Platforms at BioMarin. For example, he says custom fields in the platform had created different definitions for standard items like region, country, and audience.

With regional teams entering varied criteria for the same types of data, it became difficult to create accurate reports and find approved content. “We realized we needed more green space to grow within our environment and sought to reduce the effort required to adopt new features,” Lozinak adds. The high administrative burden that comes with customizations also resulted in slow response times and limited capacity to optimize technology.

“We realized that to push forward and achieve growth and scalability goals, we needed to standardize,” says Tom Zito, BioMarin’s associate director of global content management operations.

“We globalized our process onto one core standard based on the best practices Veeva has developed for well over a decade.” — Chris Lozinak, Principal of Veeva Platforms, BioMarin

Standardization enables innovation, integration, and growth

BioMarin decided to standardize to simplify software updates and unlock peak system performance. “We worked with Veeva to implement a new standard PromoMats environment. It would be our foundation for globalizing our process onto one core standard based on the best practices Veeva has developed for well over a decade,” says Lozinak.

“I’m proud of how efficiently and effectively our team worked to complete the transition. It gives BioMarin a solid foundation to build on. It’s exciting that standardization can bring benefits on day one as well as deliver long-term growth potential,” Zito adds.

Lozinak views PromoMats standardization as the ultimate path to flexibility: content teams follow a core, proven process while retaining the ability to adapt as needed.

Both content leaders agree that the shift to standardization is achievable when you anchor it to business needs and lead change with the ‘why.’ BioMarin set clear governance parameters and defined the global core first — determining which customizations were non-negotiable — and held a monthly strategic collective with representatives from digital strategy, medical, and communications. With high-touch change management, they built trust and earned decision autonomy.

“Standardizing turned a heavily customized environment into a foundation that scales, improves the user experience, and strengthens the system long-term.” — Tom Zito, Associate Director, Global Content Management Operations, BioMarin

Early results: faster content cycles and a more productive field team

Less than a year after launching the standardized PromoMats environment, BioMarin is seeing significant reductions in content cycle times and time to approval. “The field team is happier because the content is being released much faster. The business is experiencing an overall ease of use now that our submission process time has decreased,” Zito says.

Key operational advantages realized include:

• Faster user adoption of PromoMats with fewer operational roadblocks
• Reduced daily troubleshooting within the content management platform
• Increased content reuse enabled by a clean data environment
• Simplified, faster search capabilities across the platform

The speed and scalability of the content life cycle far exceed what was possible under heavy customization, opening up clear ‘green space’ for BioMarin to grow. “By standardizing, we didn’t just fix a process — we engineered a foundation that allows us to innovate and scale globally without hesitation.”

What’s next for BioMarin

With standard PromoMats integrations established, BioMarin is actively enabling downstream digital channels. The team is looking forward to using streamlined content authoring and optimized data flows into and out of PromoMats.

Learn more in this whitepaper Building the Future of MLR with AI: Fastest Path to Approved Content.