Bristol Myers Squibb Has Another Tool To Reap Product Development BenefitsBristol Myers Squibb Has Another Tool To Reap Product Development Benefits

Bristol-Myers Squibb isn't using product life-cycle management software, but it's achieving benefits related to shortening product development cycles nonetheless. The company has in place a pilot of SAP's composite application, built on top of its NetWeaver integration technology, and dubbed the xApp Resource and Program Management Tool. It uses the software for managing and executing complex research and development projects in conjunction with Microsoft Project, to gain "better visibility of our utilization of resources and to control the dynamics in the process," says Gerald Kolber, information management, shared services, at Bristol-Myers Squibb.

"We're all trying to focus on having the best, most potentially successful products in our pipeline," Kolber says of the pharmaceuticals industry. The goal for everyone: To reduce the amount of time to get a commercial product on the market. While it's key to expand the number of successful products in the development portfolio, like many other industries, pharmaceutical companies are struggling with managing R&D costs.

"That led us to the logical approach of needing to get better resource management around assets and human resources," he says. Together, xRPM and Microsoft Project, along with existing time and tracking systems, are being better utilized and focused toward these types of objectives. Data on portfolio project plans from Microsoft Project or spending in R/3 can flow into xRPM to help the company know when, for example, to drop a trial, change its location, postpone it, or accelerate it. Doing things right requires taking into account the potential domino effect--for instance, if you accelerate a clinical trial, might that have an unforeseen impact in a lab in the New Jersey headquarters? In the past, companies would have to make these judgments without any sophisticated systems to help. Kolber says that the tool's ability to work with existing systems helped make this the kind of "quick hit," lower-cost project that's finding favor over long-term and high-priced enterprise implementations in many companies these days. The main barrier to entry, he says, is how formalized R&D policies and existing processes are. "From a technology point of view, it's rapid implementation," he says. "We manage our projects and have very distinct gatepoints. For a company that didn't have that in place, it would be more difficult to use something like xRPM because the data coming in has to be meaningful--that's the first thing you need in place."

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