Case study: Cultivating knowledge through collaboration

Knowledge needs to be circulated in order to grow and evolve into innovation. Recognizing the valuable role collaboration plays in cultivating knowledge, F. Hoffmann-La Roche AG (Roche), a leading healthcare and pharmaceutical company, began searching for an information-sharing solution to support the full lifecycle of its global team projects; a solution which would strengthen processes and add significant value to development projects.

The drug industry, including both research and capital-intensive concentrations, accounts for approximately 65% of Roche’s total sales, in the amount of 19 billion Swiss francs. Roche employs more than 69,000 people and sells its products in over 150 countries. Competitive pressure is high. At the same time, pharmaceutical product development cycles—from conception to marketing—require on average 4 to 10 years longer than in most other industries. Increasing the efficiency at which global development teams cooperate is a critical factor in determining the speed at which new drugs can be readied for the market. In the pharmaceutical industry, faster time-to-market equals a decisive competitive edge—one that Roche wanted to make its own.

Global Teamwork

Roche had long been aware that increasing the efficiency of team processes would have great value-added potential, however the company lacked suitable IT and software tools to support these processes effectively. So, Roche resorted to an interim solution—a combination of shared drives, e-mail and conventional document management systems.

This interim solution fell far short of the functionality required by the development teams to create a common framework for project collaboration that could be applied regardless of ever-changing project structures. Whenever a project team was newly created or when its composition was modified, the information collected up to that point was either lost completely or had to be re-assembled and saved, costing unnecessary time and resources.

ShareWeb

In light of these inefficiencies, Roche decided early in 1998 to look for alternative solutions. The company wanted to use sophisticated new technologies—a Web architecture was the main criterion—for fast and easy rendering of information. Client-server installations were not a feasible alternative, given the global rollout that would have been necessary. Additionally, Roche wanted a solution with a high degree of core functionality in order to avoid substantial expenses for adaptation and higher development costs. The following were the main requirements Roche identified: document management, workflow, virtual teamwork, powerful search and discussion groups, as well as multi-level security and permissions for groups and specific roles. Special attention was paid to the integration of existing directory services (LDAP) and HTML compatibility to support Web-content management.

Measured against these criteria, Open Text’s Livelink achieved the best results of all the solutions evaluated. In fact, between its functionality and fully Web-based architecture, Livelink met all the requirements outlined by Roche.

Within just three months after Livelink was selected, Roche's Livelink-based platform for information sharing, designated ShareWeb, was implemented and online without causing any substantial disruptions to daily work routines at Roche.

The global rollout of Livelink was launched simultaneously with the implementation at Roche headquarters in Basel, Switzerland. The four key pharmaceutical development centers—in Basel, New Jersey, California and England—were taken online. At the same time, Livelink was rolled out in other Roche locations around the world, such as Australia, South Africa, Canada, Japan and France, to name but a few.

Prior to implementing Livelink, team members newly added to a project, in particular, found it difficult to gain a quick overview of the current level of information and knowledge related to a project. Cross-project communications were also complicated. Teams often worked on projects unaware that another team was working on a very similar project. Work was duplicated when teams could have bundled their efforts instead.

"ShareWeb brings the various countries in the Asia-Pacific region into one community. Now we can easily access various training and compliance programs, as well as clinical trial information in our daily work," said Rosalind Lu, Medical Director, Taiwan.

"Thanks to ShareWeb, new employees can be integrated into teams faster, and responsibility for access management and control has been transferred back to the co-ordinators, which has helped to increase the teams' flexibility considerably. The global 'shared drives' have been replaced by ShareWeb, thus eliminating their expensive administration. Project timeframes have been minimized through more efficient information flows; processes have become faster, more flexible and more efficient," summarized Mike Zettler, ShareWeb Project Manager.

User Acceptance

The ShareWeb project team took special care in ensuring quality internal communication about the project in order to guarantee a high level of user acceptance from the start and to communicate the benefits of the new solution in an optimal way. The team held meetings with development project managers to instruct them in the use of the system. Once team members had been defined, they were given half-day internal training sessions. At the same time, "project coordinators" were selected who would be responsible for administrative processes, as well as researching and disseminating information relevant to projects. These coordinators received special training for ShareWeb.

This gradual introduction of the system has led to a high level of user acceptance with respect to ShareWeb. Today more than 5,000 employees in more than 85 countries use the Livelink-based system. Approximately 250,000 documents can be searched and retrieved via a standard Web browser in a large variety of formats, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF and HTML.

Benefits

Since the launch of ShareWeb, there have been significant qualitative and quantitative improvements in project management: • access to documents is now independent of formats • international teams can be assembled much faster than before • new team members take substantially less time to familiarize themselves • more information is exchanged within and between project teams than in the past • knowledge from previous projects is no longer lost, but is available, and updated at all times • costs for administration and development have dropped considerably

Given Livelink’s support for XML, ShareWeb, in the meantime, is also being used as a content management system for parts of the pharmaceutical intranet, bridging the gap between global team collaboration and content management for the intranet. In addition, ShareWeb serves as a platform for other internal business applications, thus achieving a higher rate of information integration.

Marking yet another milestone for Roche, the solution enables support for collaboration with external business partners. ShareWeb’s Web-based architecture is essential to this external application and, together with its Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), the solution meets the high security standards of Roche.