CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
18 July 2007
Implementation Investments
Purdue Pharma Turns to Microsoft for Document Management Solution
Purdue Pharma L.P., a pharmaceutical company, has chosen Microsoft Corp. and Interse A/S , a Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner, to help automate and enhance the management of its clinical trial documentation.
By building a document management solution based on Microsoft Office SharePoint® Portal Server 2003 and Interse's iBox metadata management and search solution, Purdue has been able to streamline many of the processes associated with document management. Creating a new clinical project document site used to take up to a half day for Purdue staff, but since deploying the new solution, the process has been reduced to minutes.
"Before deploying Office SharePoint Server and iBox, our staff could literally spend days trying to find a document," said Anthony Sclafani, assistant director, Collaborative Business Solutions at Purdue. "Sorting through file shares was a completely manual process, which was a problem with multiple financial and logistical implications. Those problems are now a thing of the past, as the new document management solution allows users to access important information with just a few clicks. It has had a remarkable impact on our business."
Purdue is known for its research on persistent pain. As with other companies in its industry, the pharmaceutical company is subject to rigorous clinical trial requirements as part of the extensive process of preparing new products for U.S. government approval and commercial availability. To meet these requirements, Purdue produces hundreds of thousands of pages of documentation per clinical trial. Before implementing the new solution, Purdue's software system was not meeting the needs of the company's staff, as it lacked unified search across the system and offered minimal metadata associations.
With Office SharePoint Server 2003, Purdue can create a new clinical project document site in just minutes. The iBox solution integrates and supports Office SharePoint Server 2003, providing metadata management and search capabilities. For instance, the company is now able to automatically associate up to 38 industry-specific metadata tags with each document, enabling more relevant searches and helping users search across documents in new ways.
"For Purdue, ensuring seamless access and increased insight into clinical trial documents is not only vital to its business, but can also potentially shorten the length and reduce the cost of the product development process," said Paul Mattes, industry solutions director of the U.S. Health and Life Sciences Group at Microsoft.
About Microsoft in Healthcare and Life Sciences
Microsoft provides standards-based products and technology to help the healthcare and life sciences industries break down information barriers between the disparate IT environments across pharmaceutical, biotechnology and medical device companies, physicians and healthcare professionals, provider organizations, government and private-sector employers, health insurers, and consumers. More information about Microsoft in Healthcare and Life Sciences can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/healthcare .
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