Off with their overheads…

By Rob Adams, Xenos

Or how one multinational pharmaceuticals manufacturer transformed its business process and dramatically reduced overhead through intelligent electronic information presentment.

Faced with increasing overhead costs, executives at a multinational pharmaceuticals manufacturer initially believed the best way to reduce expenses was by reducing head count, and by replacing legacy systems with ones that were less expensive – even though the new solutions would be less functional than the original systems.

Recognizing that this would be too great a compromise, company executives sought alternative solutions that would not only reduce operational cost but also improve business process.

One such opportunity was a move to an entirely paperless report-distribution system that would also provide for the secure online presentation of customer facing statements. Indeed, report production and distribution was viewed as ripe for improvement: printing costs for each of the company’s domestic divisions had reached as much as $600,000 a year – and were even greater to burst, collate and distribute reports to the company’s numerous global facilities.

Once it had committed to going paperless, the IT team quickly realized that re-engineering processes and replacing applications was not an alternative worth considering at a time when budgets across the company were being cut substantially. Instead, the team determined that any new solution would have to integrate with existing applications and business processes – leveraging them without changing them. The team also decided that the solution would have to:

• Transform all data types produced for mainframe printers into flexible formats that could be presented over a wide range of end-user channels.
• Incorporate a centralized repository to minimize the need for high-priced mainframe access.
• Control access to specific content by assigning security authorization levels to each page.
• Allow for the direct web presentation of customer billing and statement information through existing corporate portals.

The solution
Xenos infoWEB met all of these stringent functional requirements. The solution has enabled the company to cut operational overhead rapidly and substantially – and to become more adaptable to dynamically changing user demands. Xenos infoWEB identifies, transforms, processes and indexes information – and then presents it securely, in real time, over any defined electronic channel, web, e-mail, fax, printer, file system or xml, to any internal or external end-user group. As a result, information is available in real-time and end-user analysis and repurposing can begin immediately.

Xenos infoWEB implements rapidly without requiring change to existing infrastructure, and simple web-enabled administrative tasks replace what once required complex programming. As a result, decision makers now have real-time access to vital information, customers have secure access to billing and statement information on-line and a variety of document formats can be easily and directly repurposed to other applications such as spreadsheets and databases.

The result
Xenos infoWEB is now fully rolled out in 15 separate divisions within the company. More than 11,000 named users and countless web consumers use the solution to access some 12,000 reports made up of approximately 2.5 billion distributed pages annually. For the company, the bottom-line returns of its paperless report-distribution process are substantial: estimated savings in excess of $10 million US annually.

And these savings are only the tip of the iceberg. With Xenos infoWEB implemented centrally in the company’s corporate data centre, benefits can now be leveraged across other divisions, resulting in additional savings. Equally important, the solution has empowered the company to enhance customer and partner relations by offering online portal-based access to statements, invoices and other reports.

In short, Xenos infoWEB has enabled the company to realize tremendous cost savings, and improve business process and service. Xenos infoWEB has delivered even greater cost benefits than the company originally hoped to achieve, and has spurred dramatic improvement of a whole range of business processes and services. Moreover, the company anticipates scaling the solution to increasingly more divisions throughout the company, and moving more customer-facing documents directly online, reaping even greater savings and benefits over the years to come.