PHARMACEUTICAL CASE STUDY
Modernizing Global Policy Governance
About
Novo Nordisk is a global healthcare company founded in 1923 and headquartered near Copenhagen, Denmark.
The company discovers, develops and manufactures medicines focused on serious chronic diseases, particularly diabetes and obesity, as well as rare blood and endocrine disorders. With operations across more than 170 countries, Novo Nordisk requires strong governance structures that can support a large, complex and highly regulated global organization.
As its policy environment continued to grow, Novo Nordisk needed a more scalable way to manage ethics and compliance policies across regions, teams and formats.
Industry
Global Healthcare and Pharmaceuticals
Company Size
69,000+
Headquarter
Near Copenhagen, Denmark
Founded
1923
Services
- Innovate - Custom
- Ethics & Compliance Policy Platform
Challenge
For a global organization operating in a highly regulated environment, policy governance must be clear, consistent and easy to manage.
Novo Nordisk’s existing policy environment had become fragmented across tools, regions and formats. This made it difficult to enforce consistency, manage updates, maintain traceability and ensure that employees were always accessing the latest approved versions.
As policy libraries grew and changed more frequently, manual processes and decentralized storage increased the risk of outdated content being used. This created unnecessary governance gaps, additional administrative effort and potential audit exposure.
- Dispersed tools and inconsistent policy formats
- No centralized version control
- Risk of outdated or conflicting policy content
- Limited audit traceability and usage analytics
- Manual update and notification processes
- Fragmented access across regions and teams
- Growing regulatory pressure requiring more scalable governance control
Solution
Netsurit worked with Novo Nordisk to design and implement the Ethics & Compliance Policy Platform, known as ECPP.
The platform was created as a governed, digital-first environment for policy publishing, access and lifecycle management. The goal was to replace fragmented tools and manual processes with a single, structured platform that could improve control, traceability, usability and scale across the global organization.
The rollout was delivered in phases: Phase 1 established the governance foundation while Phase 2 is designed to expand ECPP into a richer compliance knowledge hub.
The solution included:
- Mapping the policy lifecycle, clarifying ownership and approvals, and translating this into practical platform rules.
- Creating a single source of truth with a clear taxonomy and consistent publishing standards.
- Enabling controlled publishing, automatic versioning and audit-ready history tracking.
- Defining admin, member and visitor permissions to keep governance with authorized owners while maintaining simple access for users.
- Improving discoverability through search, filtering and intuitive navigation across devices.
Novo Nordisk’s Story
For Novo Nordisk, ethics and compliance policy governance is not simply an administrative function. It is a critical part of operating responsibly across a complex global organization.
With teams working across more than 170 countries, employees need access to the right policies at the right time, and those policies need to be current, approved and easy to find. As the organization continued to grow, the existing approach to policy management became increasingly difficult to scale.
Policies were stored and managed across different tools, formats and regions, making it harder to maintain consistency, track changes and ensure that employees were always using the latest approved information. For the Ethics & Compliance team, this also created additional administrative work around updates, notifications, version control and audit preparation.
Novo Nordisk recognized the need to modernise this environment and create a more structured, digital-first approach to policy governance.
By working with Netsurit, Novo Nordisk was able to move towards a centralized platform that supports stronger governance, easier access and better traceability. The Ethics & Compliance Policy Platform was designed to give employees a single place to find approved policy content, while giving policy owners the control, workflows and visibility needed to manage content at global scale.
The result is a more practical and future-ready policy governance environment – one that supports compliance, improves usability and creates a foundation for future AI-enabled policy intelligence.
Before Netsurit
Before the ECPP implementation, policy management relied on fragmented processes that were difficult to scale across a global organization.
Teams had to manage policy updates, publishing, access and communications across different tools and formats. This created unnecessary complexity for administrators and made it harder for employees to know whether they were viewing the most current approved content.
The previous environment also made audit preparation more manual, as version history, ownership, updates and publishing processes were not as structured or visible as they needed to be.
Why Netsurit
Novo Nordisk needed more than a technical implementation. It needed a partner that could understand the governance challenge, design a practical operating model and build a platform that people would actually use.
Netsurit combined governance thinking, Microsoft platform expertise and user experience design to create a solution that was structured enough for a global compliance environment, but simple enough for everyday use.
The work focused on turning complex policy governance requirements into a practical, searchable and scalable digital platform.
How Netsurit Helped Novo Nordisk
Netsurit helped Novo Nordisk move from fragmented policy management to a more structured, governed and accessible digital platform.
The project focused on four key areas:
1. Governance design
Netsurit worked with Novo Nordisk to map the policy lifecycle, define ownership and approvals, and create rules for publishing, access and version control.
2. Platform structure
The team created a central repository with a clear taxonomy, helping users find the right policies faster and reducing the risk of duplicated or outdated content.
3. User adoption
Search, filtering, navigation and device-friendly access were prioritised to make the platform practical for employees and easier to use in daily work.
4. Future readiness
By centralising and structuring policy content, ECPP created a strong foundation for future enhancements, including AI-enabled search and Q&A
Results and Impact
The ECPP initiative shifted Novo Nordisk from fragmented, manual policy management to a governed, scalable platform that supports global consistency and local usability.
The impact is visible across governance, efficiency, user experience and audit readiness.
Single source of truth
Employees now have access to the latest approved policies in one central platform, reducing the risk of outdated guidance and improving consistency across regions.
Stronger governance and lifecycle control
Structured workflows, publishing rules and version history replaced informal “upload and email” processes, improving accountability and change traceability.
Improved audit readiness
ECPP provides clearer audit evidence through policy history, controlled versioning and documented publishing processes.
Faster access to information
Improved search, filtering and navigation help users find the right policy quickly, when it matters.
Less administrative effort
Central administration and structured updates reduce manual communication and repetitive coordination for the Ethics & Compliance team.
Future-ready foundation
With policy content centralized and structured, the platform enables future Phase 2 enhancements such as AI-enabled search and Q&A, while maintaining governance controls.
Scaling Up with Netsurit
Looking to modernize the way your organization manages policies, compliance knowledge or internal governance content?
Netsurit helps organizations design practical, secure and user-friendly digital platforms that improve control, reduce complexity and support the way people work.
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