Recently, a leading Global Biotechnology company based in California identified the need to obtain a centralized presentation management system. At the time, all content resided inside of Documentum, and Medical Affairs struggled with a manual process of routing slide content through legal and regulatory (and eventually) out to their brands. After doing an extensive analysis of the product offerings in the market place, Medical Affairs and the CIO decided to implement Heartbeat Software’s presentation management solution, Heartbeat Presenter.

The Problem

The organization identified inefficiencies in their slide management, creation and approval process. For years Medical Affairs had been charged with delivering thousands of slides to brands, who in turn used the content to educate their opinion leaders, speakers and investigators about existing and upcoming products. Since all slide content is highly confidential, and goes through hundreds of iterations before getting approved by legal and regulatory, the job of managing the presentations became overwhelming.

One of the biggest concerns was that Medical Affairs lacked the ability to track versions of slide content, and had no way of archiving individual pages for simple retrieval and reporting. When they began to analyze the existing enterprise-wide content management system, they found that it lacked the ease-of-use and specific functionality necessary to assemble, track and manage slide content on an individual slide level. Furthermore, there was no approval workflow in place enabling the efficient routing of content through legal and regulatory. It was eventually decided that the company was losing money as a result of inefficiency and jeopardizing sales by not marketing brands effectively.

The Medical Affairs Director explains, “For us, one of the keys to effective marketing is providing our physician audiences with product data in a timely manner, and our previous slide management process was seriously hindering us.” Medical Affairs, IT, and the key brands got together to address this problem, and shortly thereafter decided to initiate a search for a software solution that would help them address their issues.

The Solution

The company analyzed a slew of vendors, as well as their own enterprise document management system, and decided to eventually implement Heartbeat Software’s presentation management solution.

Heartbeat’s presentation management solution, according to the Director of Medical Affairs, met an overwhelming majority of their needs, “When we first learned of Heartbeat Presenter we were skeptical, as they are a young company developing software with the newest technologies. But when we dug a little deeper we found that their software was a great fit. They had the approval, archiving, assembly, and search functionality we were looking for...and they clearly outclassed their competitors.”

Later that year, Heartbeat implementation experts set out to map the business units’ exact business processes against Heartbeat’s presentation management functionality. Meetings were set up to with all the key stakeholders, including brand managers, sales and marketing, legal and regulatory, finance, and medical affairs. A content migration strategy was put in place and considerations were made for future global rollouts.

Consistent content templates were created to match brand guidelines, and the content approval workflow was mapped to match internal Legal and Regulatory process. They also targeted the need to increase efficiency by eliminating duplicate content creation efforts.

The Director of Medical Affairs explains, “What’s really exciting about the implementation is that now we have the flexibility to assemble presentations ourselves right inside the system. My content administrators can now build new presentations without uploading a single slide. And whenever a slide is changed, the system automatically updates all presentations where that slide exists. This ensures consistency and eliminates duplicate efforts across all of our content.”

Heartbeat technical staff also deployed a seamless workflow and content routing system, ensuring that approved content flowed directly to the brand extranets and then out to their key physicians.

Prior to launch Heartbeat trainers and client administrators mapped out a detailed training and change management plan to ensure product uptake and ease-of-use. Today, Heartbeat Presenter is being deploying across the entire enterprise.

A Global Future

Upon launch of the system, the company was so pleased with the results that they decided to begin strategy sessions to implement a global rollout. Their plan involved rolling out the system across three more continents to thousands of users.

“In all of our global enterprise implementations we carefully consider scalability and global content creation ramifications,” explains Kenji Mitsuka, Heartbeat Software’s Director of Consulting Services. “With this implementation, we knew they would eventually be rolling out our software to departments in Canada, Switzerland, Japan and Australia. And it was essential we carefully analyze the hardware and scalability configurations before implementation.”

“What we’ve done,” says the Director of Medical Affairs, “is define a new process that will soon be implemented globally. I’m proud to say it was initiated by my department, and I’m very pleased to have partnered with Heartbeat Software on the initiative.”