The Future of Collaboration

Our first collaboration experience post proved to be quite popular, so we are trying another installment. Let us know how you use them, and how we could make it more useful for you! 

The Client is a manufacturer of pharmaceutical products.  The company is doing very well this year—the stock hit an all time high during the collaborative event following the news of very strong quarterly earnings.  The Pharmaceutical, or Life Sciences industry, is doing very well globally.  It is particularly strong in the United States, where Managed Care has come to dominate the medical scene.  (Often misunderstood, the object of Managed Care is to have people not go to an expensive hospital, but treat them less expensively with pharmaceutical products early and often instead.  If you are a pharmaceutical company, this is a good thing.)  The lack of any national health care initiatives and relatively low price increases make changes to this landscape unlikely.  The toughest issue that pharmaceutical companies face is when big profit-producing products come off patent protection and can be undercut by generic manufacturers. That forces them to keep developing and marketing new molecules (products).

The clients issue was around setting up a global information system.  Usually called ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning), a set of software products like SAP, Oracle, PeopleSoft and Baan are allowing companies to leverage the knowledge and data they have all around the world.  This is not easy, and frequently means reengineering their business processes in major and culturally painful ways to take advantage of the system possibilities.  The client has recently selected XYZ as its software platform, and was beginning to come to grips with the enormity of the project.  They were coming to the session to set out a clear vision of the project, understand the business processes that would be affected, set up some sort of timeline/implementation scheme and understand the barriers and risks involved.

The sponsor meeting to design the workshop was held one month before the session.  They grappled with the scope (enterprise or financial level), who needed to be there (determined by the scope) and how to deal with the CFO, CIO and other key player schedules.  They were good sponsors—trying to get their arms around the collaboration session process and what it could do for them.  They had understood it to be more of a package selection and alignment building process and did not understand at first its potential to drive towards an implementation plan once the package was selected.  

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