I left in 2002 but at one point I got pulled aside by an internal investigations team to look into the sales force to find dropped shipments and unusual activity with certain doctors and sales reps. I put together these complicated excel things with hundreds of thousands of data points which in Excel 2K took a lot of tabs and VBA as “big data” era hadn’t arrived yet.
They wouldn’t tell me WHY but a few years after I left, I found out one of the things it was used for:
“In 2004, Schering-Plough was accused of marketing gimmicks and payoffs to doctors for prescribing the company’s pharmaceutical products.[31]”