Client Overview
This customer is one of Europe’s largest privately-held pharmaceutical companies with more than 3,000 employees in over 20 countries around the world and revenues in excess of €700 million.
Business Challenge
Like most pharmaceutical companies from around the world, this client has to manage more than 120,000 documents, most of which are under regulatory control. Occasionally, an external event takes place that requires changes to a large portion of the data. In this case, new telephone area codes were assigned in a given geography that required mass changes to their data. Further complicating this requirement was that the data was spread across a number of Notes databases located throughout the organization.
Previous challenges such as these were addressed manually. Small to medium size compliance projects were done by existing developers, which created some employee dissatisfaction. Large projects of this nature would require the services of outsourced developers. Either way, time intended for development of existing or new applications was spent doing manual search and replace activities. Not only was this activity very time consuming, it was also very prone to error resulting in increased maintenance requirements.
The Teamstudio Solution
The client contacted Teamstudio to find out if an automated solution existed that would address this predicament. After gaining an understanding of the challenges they faced, it was decided that the correct solution would be one that included the acquisition of Teamstudio Configurator for each developer, including on-site training and implementation.
By having Teamstudio implement Configurator, the client was up and running very quickly. The on-site training eliminated much of the learning curve resulting in productive developers almost immediately.
Results
The intensive manual effort required to accommodate mass changes to their application data has been replaced by an automated approach, saving the client significant time and expense while improving data quality and employee satisfaction. With the adoption of Teamstudio Configurator, Notes developers can now perform global search and replace requests in minutes instead of hours. Because this activity has been automated, the risks associated with manual processes have been all but eliminated.
The client estimates that the resulting time savings is two hours each week per developer, just for eliminating manual search. With five developers, the client is saving €500 each week. Since they have implemented Configurator, their developers no longer dread the next inevitable wave of changes required to their Notes applications and/or data.