Larmer Brown Case Study - Wyeth Pharmaceuticals

Wyeth Pharmaceuticals

In 2006 Wyeth employed more than 43,000 people worldwide, each one committed to improving the health of people around the world. Diverse and talented people who worked at Wyeth brought to the company a range of talent in research, marketing, sales and manufacturing. At that time Wyeth operated from four sites in the south of England. Each site had a specific purpose:

Taplow: UK HQ: prescriptions, consumer products and SMA Nutrition.

Maidenhead: The Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) headquarters.

Havant: A high tech packaging and worldwide distribution complex.

Gosport: The centre of pharmaceutical research, development and analysis.

The Project

Wyeth Pharmaceuticals identified a business need to upgrade their existing medical information system to the latest version of Siebel. Their Project Manager, Marianne Patterson, confirmed, "Besides the obvious functional improvements, our business identified a definite need to meet compliance and regulation standards whilst maintaining support levels across our ever expanding product portfolio."

The Project Team were aware that previous deployments had not included sufficient user training or support. It was agreed that this need would be addressed on the new Project, however, with the usual deadlines and cost controls, they had to identify a way to persuade their users to help them, and help themselves.

The Solution

Larmer Brown had provided clients in the Pharmaceutical industry with project based training and support solutions since 1992, utilising various tools including OnDemand Personal Navigator (now known as Oracle User Productivity Kit). With this experience Larmer Brown was well equipped to propose an informed and innovative solution to Wyeth´s training requirements.

The Project Team agreed to a Pilot Project and Consultants from Larmer Brown provided training and support throughout this initial evaluation period. Once the OnDemand solution had been approved internally and developers assigned, in accordance with Wyeth´s policy to motivate and educate its own personnel, a dedicated knowledge transfer program was designed and delivered.

Senior Medical Information Scientists led the development of the training material for the new Siebel system. They attended the knowledge transfer program and agreed, "The ease of not just creating the content but editing it continually as you need to on such projects was a real bonus." Mariane added, "The project benefitted both in time and budget using OnDemand Personal Navigator. Its´ use negated the need for a separate training environment, which would have comprised expensive hardware and weeks of set up. Using OnDemand Personal Navigator also allowed us to run the testing and training programmes successfully in tandem."

The Result

The Siebel Project met its deadlines and went live on 26th October 2006. All 22 Medical Information Scientists had been trained prior to going live and were then responding to over 1500 calls per month. Furthermore, OnDemand Personal Navigator content was published into Wyeth´s Learning Management System, known as the Learning Excellence Centre. This enabled quick access for new employees to be trained. Mariane commented, "Other areas of the business are saving time and money by modifying the original OnDemand content we created to fit their needs in a fraction of the time it would have taken to deliver materials of this quality in the past."

Mariane summarised, "The difference that OnDemand Personal Navigator has made to the Medical Information department of Wyeth is immense, they can now draw on the processes and standards that have been documented for the entire product portfolio, in minutes."

On 1st November 2008 Global Knowledge Software was acquired by Oracle. This acquisition brought GKS’ products, including OnDemand Personal Navigator, the engine that powered Oracle’s User Productivity Kit (UPK) into the Oracle family.

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