Knowledge is a vital asset for today’s leading pharmaceutical companies. Managing and leveraging this knowledge effectively is crucial to a company’s success. Without this, significant time is spent looking for information, recreating work and possibly repeating mistakes leading to lost sales, missed opportunities and excess overhead. One leading pharmaceutical company relies on Kofax Kapow™ Software to effectively help leverage the company’s key manufacturing technical knowledge.
The Challenge
The organization depends on its ever-growing store of technical process knowledge to resolve issues faster and collaborate better. Without timely access to the right knowledge, schedule delays and resource costs can quickly escalate into multimillion dollar losses.
To improve its capabilities for technical problem-solving, this organization’s strategy focused on finding a better way to store and retrieve the technical process knowledge created daily that was needed to support the engineering process. They increased the success rate of finding newly created content by greater than 70 percent.
However, one big drawback remained—critical technical process knowledge about their top products remained dispersed across multiple SharePoint sites and File Shares, an estimated 20,000 unique assets, comprising almost two million documents. Each product could have up to 15,000 relevant documents.
To make things even more complex, each team site had different standards, information structures, kinds of content, metadata and access rights. Essentially each team had a unique knowledge silo. Consequently, finding the right document was not easy as traditional search capabilities were inadequate and content duplication over time left users unsure if what they had found was the latest document or not.
The organization’s challenge was to find a way to bring all technical knowledge into a single store to better manage the content. The ultimate goal was to ensure information was consistent and based on a standardized template, was an integral part of the process flow and had been assigned the proper taxonomy to ensure quick retrievability.
The Solution
The solution had to be able to analyze the various data stores to quickly find and associate content that belonged with a particular development product, classify it against a predefined set of taxonomy and business rules and ultimately process it onto the new knowledge platform in a standard manner. To accomplish this, the company selected Lexmark as the automated workflow and content processing engine to complement a semantic classification solution.
Using the combination of Kofax Kapow™ and the semantic classification product, the organization can now process content from across all the legacy sites, regardless of version or structure. This helps the team locate content they would not have been able to find manually, then automatically prioritize, classify, tag and transform the content to the new location. In addition, the process also facilitates cleanup, deduplication, exception and error handling, as well as remediating content from the original locations so the new knowledge platform holds the “single version of the truth.”
The Results
Bringing together the company’s manufacturing technical knowledge into a single location will have far-reaching effects and significant synergies for product development. Knowledge workers will spend less time searching for information, conservatively estimated at ten percent better overall resource utilization for over one thousand knowledge workers. Less need to recreate information will also reduce time and resource waste significantly and cut down on unnecessary repetition of experiments. Costs to process documents will be reduced from $4.00 (manual) to between $0.05 and $0.40 per document. Given these benefits, payback on the investment is expected to be 1.5 years.
The Future
As the company continues to refine its knowledge management strategy, the extensibility and flexibility of the content processing solution as supported by Kofax will enable the organization to adapt to evolving business requirements, including managing data at the original sources and being able to reprocess content as taxonomy and business rules change over time.
