Wyeth's prescription for BPM success
For a pharmaceutical company like Wyeth, no function is more important than research and development-the process of finding the new drugs that will lead to patents and profits. And for the information systems group that supports R&D, business process management (BPM) is emerging as a key technology and management strategy to make that function more efficient.
In fact, R&D's early success at using this technology and methodology to cut software development time in half has sparked interest from other divisions of the company that are looking to start their own BPM projects. But for Wyeth, the real payoff lies in BPM's potential to help the company define business processes and unify its information systems to break down barriers between organizational and geographic divisions and to improve collaboration and innovation.
"The demand is very high for connecting what used to be stovepiped systems," says CIO Jeffrey E. Keisling.
That demand is driven in part by the global nature of the pharmaceutical industry, in which virtual teams from different business units around the world work together to develop new drugs and related innovations. "As we develop products, that development is happening on a worldwide scale," says Keisling.
For example, one current BPM project targets the process for developing medication labeling documents, which involves collaboration across many stakeholders and approvals that have to be obtained from regulators worldwide, Keisling says.
The process is almost as involved as the application for a new drug approval, he says. Wyeth has to detail the composition of the medicine with molecular diagrams, explain restrictions on its use and document known drug interactions-all to produce the folded piece of paper you find inside each package. The application, which is still under development, will need to reach across R&D, clinical trials, and legal and regulatory review.
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Define, Align, Optimize then Automate
While I may be reading between the lines with this synopsis of what Wyeth has done in their use of BPM it becomes ever clearer that the activities prior to the application of technology in BPM are the key drivers of success (or failure) in its use.To point - you have to know what you want from the process, the desired or intended outcome, and that better be crafted from the perspective of the consumer of the process output point of view. If you know that you can align the process to that intended outcome.
And before you stick that process into any technology you better challenge it. Hand-offs are break points and the source of organizational white space. The less the better. Are all of the activities of the process value-add? If they don't contribute to the intended outcome then get out the hoe and dig 'em out of the process up front. Do business rules contribute real value? They better. Business rules are highly prone to obsolescence so if they are there they better be serving an important and meaningful purpose.
It sounds like Wyeth is doing at least some of this, and that gives them a relatively well-aligned process definition before pulling out that BPM technology and embedding their assessments (i.e. assumptions) into a software system that people must then use when doing the work of the process.
The thing you need to know more than anything else when "automating processes?" Garbage in - Garbage out.
Terry Schurter
www.ipapi.org