Organon finds success by implementing SharePoint with Vorsite Connector Technology

Reduced failed information searches by 50% while increasing productivity 10% through better data integration and collaboration

The Situation

Organon is the largest of three pharmaceutical business units of Akzo Nobel, a global leader in pharmaceuticals, coatings, and chemicals. In 2002, Organon revenues reached Euro 2.6 billion, accounting for 62% of pharmaceuticals and 19% of Akzo Nobel’s total sales. Organon employs over 13,000 people worldwide and sells products in more than 100 countries. Two of its largest facilities are located in Oss, The Netherlands, and Roseland, New Jersey.

Traditional intranet and e-mail technology had provided Organon workers basic information sharing and some low level collaboration. However, as corporate data volume exploded, the existing system had predictable consequences: overwhelmed information workers could no longer find and share what they needed.

SharePoint Products and Technologies deployment at Akzo Nobel’s Organon business unit
ITEM	STATISTICS
Number of Organon facilities worldwide	More than 50, including 5 major data centers
Number of information workers using portal daily	More than 5,000
Number of searchable stored documents	More than 10,000
Number of team sites	At least 50 per location

Michel Angevare is Organon’s Electronic Information Officer responsible for global IT infrastructure, including e-mail, document management, knowledge management, and the intranet. He describes the situation this way: “Without a comprehensive collaboration tool, it became very difficult to work together on projects…a lot of information was essentially lost because it was spread across multiple locations, such as e-mail attachments, notes, ad hoc calendars and lists on individual desktops, and widely scattered, sometimes on unsecured file servers.” Besides wasting workers’ time, this also put a strain on the company’s IT resources. “In addition, we spent a lot of time managing permissions to allow people to get information they needed,” says Angevare.

Realizing that the outdated information management system could erode profitability, corporate leaders directed Angevare and his team to design and implement a comprehensive enterprise portal solution. To provide positive return on investment, the portal had to provide fundamental improvements in three critical areas:

1. Organizing, aggregating, and securing corporate information
2. Creating flexible virtual team workspaces for improved collaboration
3. Providing additional document functionality, targeted information flow, and job-specific web sites to employees

Selecting the best portal solution required cooperation among Organon’s four major operating units: Research and Development, Regulatory Affairs, Production, and Marketing. These units share in common a number of challenges, but also have important business-specific requirements. For example, Regulatory Affairs and Production Departments must adhere to strict Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulations governing document control, versioning, audit trail, and archiving. Marketing and Research need a more flexible, information sharing and electronic collaboration system that enables easy creation of virtual teams. In addition, their information workers were already comfortable with the familiar desktop environment and tools provided by the Microsoft Office System, which was already installed and universally adapted throughout the company.

SOLUTION

The solution was planned and implemented by a team representing Organon’s business units - those that would benefit directly from the new system - its information management department, and the two main automation departments. Angevare and his team used a carefully designed scoring method to judge the enterprise portal candidates on six categories of user requirements, taking into account ease of integration, cost, and compatibility with the existing IT infrastructure and desktop environment. Using this system, an original list of about 20 candidates was quickly narrowed to only a few. High cost of ownership, limited functionality, lack of compatibility, and integration were common failings. Says Angevare: “Many of the candidates could be discarded easily. For example some solutions required us to buy a whole suite of products which are incompatible with our existing Microsoft infrastructure. Finally, only Microsoft® SharePoint™ Products and Technologies and one other candidate were left standing.”

Representatives from Microsoft and the remaining candidate were then invited to present their products’ benefits. The choice soon became clear: Organon’s enterprise portal solution would be awarded to Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies. Out-of-the-box functionality, integration with the existing IT infrastructure, data access tools, the compatibility with Vorsite Connector Technology and lower total cost of ownership were the key deciding factors. “We needed our new portal to bring all information together in a single place. Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server 2003 and Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services when fully enabled by the Vorsite Connector Technology would do a great job,” says Angevare. “Ultimately, Microsoft had a much stronger vision towards the future. We determined Microsoft was better able to provide integration with the Microsoft Office System and, through the use of Vorsite Connectors, business-specific data sources than their competition.”

A critical business requirement was integrating SharePoint Portal Server 2003 with Documentum®, the document management system used by Organon’s Regulatory Affairs and Production Departments to comply with FDA regulations. Though Documentum is an effective application for those specific businesses, deploying it on every desktop within Organon was simply not an option, according to Angevare. “Documentum is not needed for informal, unregulated document requirements that exist in parts of research and marketing … Microsoft Office will be on every information worker’s desktop, and we also expect broad adoption of our portal and intranet tools. Financially and organizationally, that is much more feasible with SharePoint Portal Server 2003 and Windows SharePoint Services than with its competitors.”

The connection between SharePoint Portal Server 2003 with Documentum was made possible by proprietary connectors developed by the Vorsite Corporation, a Microsoft Strategic Partner. This solution addressed the four key areas of this integration:

• Content/Document Sharing
• Metadata Synchronization
• Portal Integration
• Content/Document Migration

“It was important that SharePoint be able to provide smooth and secure access to Documentum for those needing it,” says Angevare, “this solution will fulfill these business requirements.” The comprehensive portal solution is based on Microsoft technologies including Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Content Management Server 2002, SharePoint Portal Server 2003, Windows SharePoint Services, Microsoft Office Front Page® 2003, IIS 6.0, SQL Server™ 2000, and ASP.Net, with Vorsite developed connections to local Microsoft Exchange Server 2000 systems for e-mail support, and to local Microsoft Windows NT® or Microsoft Active Directory® for user authentication.

Initial deployment occurred at Organon’s facilities in Oss, The Netherlands, and Roseland, New Jersey. These locations migrated smoothly to SharePoint Portal Server 2003 and Windows SharePoint Services. Both locations initially deployed 4 team sites and one business-specific application: “iMedia” (a secure site for strategic management information sharing) in Roseland, and “iMedical” (a medical issues FAQ site used by Marketing) in Oss.

Ultimately, the deployment will expand to include facilities in Cambridge and Newhouse, UK, and Gisors, France. The full deployment included Organon’s first extranet application. In addition to enabling collaboration and communication with its strategic partners and other pharmaceutical companies, the extranet also allows connectivity for smaller Organon facilities that may not have direct access to the corporate network. Deployment of the portal will eventually include more than 5,000 information workers, collaborating through hundreds of team sites. These workers will have searchable, secure access to thousands of reports, budgets, calculation models, proposals, presentations, meeting minutes, announcements, and news items, and a similar volume of documents stored in the Documentum system thanks to the added capabilities provided by the Vorsite Connector Technology.

BENEFITS

Better Information Access and Collaboration

• Improved information access:
  Departments within Organon have the seamless and secure integration they need with business-critical data sources such as drug discovery research findings, clinical trial schedules and results, production schedules, marketing plans, and formal documents stored within Documentum. The portal also benefits individual information workers. Rather than browsing through many locations for shared documents, news, team events, and personal calendars, the corporate portal will provide each employee with a home page that can be customized to provide targeted information that he or she needs for the day’s work. This is expected to reduce the time spent viewing irrelevant information by at least 10%. Information workers will also have the benefits of SharePoint Portal Server 2003’s powerful search capabilities. Previously, finding accurate, timely right information could be difficult at best. With SharePoint Portal Server 2003, it is estimated that the number of failed searches will decrease by at least 50%. Says Angevare, “Because, thanks to the Vorsite Connectors, SharePoint now provides a single, secure data source, and is accessible to everyone who needs it, much less time will be spent gathering and sharing information.”
• Better communication and collaboration:
  The portal is making communication and teamwork is easier and faster than before by saving information workers’ time searching for and accessing documents. As a result, they can process and share information with greater speed, resulting in more accurate and faster decision making throughout the company. And, since SharePoint
  Portal Server 2003 and Windows SharePoint Services are part of the Microsoft Office System; the company’s information workers will be using familiar desktop tools while achieving a projected 10% increase in productivity on shared tasks. Michel Angevar describes the key advantages for Organon: “The built-in document handling functions of SharePoint Team sites, including check-in/check-out and version control, as well as alerts, team announcements, and calendars, will contribute substantially to improved collaboration and team productivity. These are great features.”
• Secure, smooth access to business specific data sources and third-party document management systems:
  With Single Sign-on (SSO) and the Vorsite application integration, users will move smoothly between environments such as Documentum without the need to log onto multiple systems. Eliminating multiple logins and unnecessary navigation is expected to cut the time needed to access business specific data by at least 10%.
• Remain competitive through custom intranet and extranet applications:
  In addition to business-specific applications such as iMedia and iMedical, Organon plans to expand the use of custom intranet applications, including “iProduct”, a set of intranet sites combining information on Organon’s product groups. Extranet sites will enable collaboration with other pharmaceutical companies, who will benefit from greater information access for drug discovery research, marketing, and other business functions. “These applications are needed by the business to stay competitive, and could not be created using the previous intranet technology. SharePoint will enable us to move ahead quickly.”

Faster Development, Lower Deployment Costs for Lower TCO

Organon rejected other collaborative solutions because of their incompatibility with existing IT infrastructure, limited ability to integrate business-specific data sources, the time and resources required to develop custom intranet applications, and projected cost. In contrast, the portal based on Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server 2003, fully empowered by the Vorsite Connector Technology, delivered rapid time-to-benefit of about 8 months from proof-of-concept to full deployment), and reduced deployment costs, for lower total cost of ownership (TCO) both at the start of the project and over its useful life.

Easy to use power makes SharePoint Products and Technologies and Vorsite Connector Technology the clear winners

Given the user requirements for a new enterprise information portal, Microsoft and Vorsite were the clear winners. The combination of power, flexibility, and intuitive extensions of familiar tools through the connectors developed by Vorsite, enable Akzo Nobel’s Organon unit to realize a fast return on its investment. With the new portal, the company’s information workers are equipped to organize, aggregate, and share critical information within flexible team workspaces in ways that were never before possible. Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies, along with the Vorsite Connector Technology, is a powerful means to boost decision making and collaboration throughout the company, and is one of the most productive investments Organon could make in the future.

To learn how your enterprise can increase operational efficiency, boost productivity, improve quality and enable compliance through a Full System Integration made possible by Vorsite Connector Technology. Call 206-781-1797 or visit online at www.Vorsite.com