Pharmaceutical leverages knowledge with technology

When a company can support a knowledge management initiative with technology and point to quantifiable productivity gains as well as hard-to-quantify yet high value returns, it has brought in a very successful change. One such company appears to be pharmaceutical research firm Glaxo Wellcome.

Bringing in Open Text's Livelink was part of the solution. The tool alone has helped automate business processes through workflow, enable collaboration between teams spread across the map and improve reuse of corporate knowledge.

"With Livelink we have been able to create a collaborative workgroup area on the Web where our geographically dispersed teams work together on projects, develop common goals and take advantage of valuable discussion areas," said Joe Felix, director of commercial information technology, Glaxo Wellcome.

The technology isn't doing it alone. In order to facilitate knowledge sharing, Glaxo Wellcome has instituted what it calls a sales and marketing knowledge exchange system. This system has helped promote discussion between employees on what has worked well for the company, and encourages users to tap into the system for previous project information in order to facilitate reuse.

Clearly the collaboration and knowledge capture and reuse are beneficial, though difficult to measure. However, one aspect LiveLink's results have been measurable in are on the workflow side: "We are also using Livelink as the engine to drive our workflow applications and have already realized a 50 percent savings in process time.