Reference MWG Biotech AG
With our solution based on the Oracle Collaboration Suite and the Application Server, a platform for company-wide Knowledge Management is now at our disposal, which improves our communication processes sustainably and saves costs at the same time.“
Ulrike Schramm
International Public Relations Manager MWG Biotech AG
Speed beats all – this applies especially in the Biotech industry, a branch in which at innovation rates of up to 50 % new products are out of date within two years. International presence on a fast moving market requires optimal worldwide information flow. For global acting medium-sized companies efficient communication, in which all employees-independent of their location- are involved, is an important competition advantage.
MWG Biotech AG based in Ebersberg near Munich was found in 1990 as limited company and firstly made a name for itself as provider and partner in the genomic research with manufacturing, analysing and distributing bio molecules and their development. In the course of time, own product developments were increasingly added to the sales activities, which focused on the manufacturing of synthetic gene sequences (so-called oligo-nucleotides) and the necessary innovative technologies.
In the field of oligo-nucleotides production the MWG Biotech AH is now the number one in Europe, with 6 own sites in Europe, USA and India as well as distribution partners on all continents.
Worldwide information and communication in the MWG International Intranet
Speed beats all – successful and fast acting requires efficient communication processes. The existing Intranet, however, was only at the head office’s disposal, project information was allocated to different systems, communication via E-Mail and Telephone was insufficient for the cooperation across locations.
In order to involve the around 350 employees worldwide more efficiently into the company processes, improve the communication and accelerate the information flow, MWG Biotech AG decided to introduce an integrated information and communication platform based on Oracle.
Thanks to protected areas risk-free data exchange and common use of documents in different organizations such as Marketing is easily possible. Thanks to a sophisticated revision concept of database-based workspaces, marketing collaborators can work together on new pricelists, while the sales organization still uses the current version. After releasing changes, the new pricelist is then available immediately worldwide. The File Server can be used by all departments. „This is a huge advantage in terms of communication support of our project culture“, Ulrike Schramm explains. „Every project manager can independently establish a workspace either publicly or non-publicly, install members and their access rights, install files and data and, when the project is finished, delete the workspace again. This releases our IT, pleases our collaborators, who can therefore establish independently what they need, and makes us in general more flexible and faster.”
MWG BIOTECH International Intranet – more than just a portal
Thanks to the integration with the Oracle Collaboration Suite, the portal could be established quickly as workspace for the total communication, although the peripheral administrators had to spend a lot of time entering the contents at first.
Planning of meetings can be done with the integrated common calendar, employees of the different service teams meet in the chat room in order to discuss problem solutions.
Discussion forums and bulletin board boast the internal communication and experience exchange. Web-Conferencing is especially highly accepted among the staff. Whether CRM training, sales training or ERP introduction, the training of international staff is increasingly executed virtually.
“Also our directors use our International Intranet“, Ulrike Schramm explains. “They appreciate to spend less time travelling. For all employees the Intranet creates a feeling of “We” – you can log on from everywhere and have access in My Space to all documents which have been entered before via the MWG Server. This is of course a big advantage in case of loosing a laptop when travelling.”
Return on Investment thanks to cost cuttings detectable at short
Improved information quality is hardly measurable- „What if“- analysis are not objectively accountable. Thanks to collaboration, already in the first month after introducing the new solution, cost cuttings could be measured, which suggest a very short ROI.
The first CRM training of Italian colleagues saved costs already. Apart from the travel expenses for the project manager of 850 Euro, also the time for travelling to and from Italy of about one day is not applicable. Drastic savings could be reached at a four-day sales training of 6 new sales representatives in India, as the comprehensive training in this highly specialized market would have required five different product managers as trainers. 10 days of travelling time and about 5.600 Euro travelling expenses were saved thanks to Web-Conferencing.
We assume that many of the business travels up until now for trainings and trouble shootings internally as well as for the client will be dropped”, Ulrike Schramm says. “Until the end of 2004 we will document these savings consequently and assume that we can then prove our ROI expectations against our Board of Directors very convincingly.”
Why Oracle?
In case of numerous IT subjects, Oracle is the strategic partner of MWG BIOTECH AG. However, products of different suppliers were evaluated at first.
One reason for the decision was the stability and quality of Oracle solutions when handling data-intensive processes, which is highly appreciated by MWG BIOTECH AG. Huge amounts of data with very complex data structures have to be administrated and communicated via the portal. At the same time, minimal integration effort was expected from Oracle through the use of Collaboration Suite and Portal.
Some of the products could only display our requirements for the stationary portal insufficiently or did not meet our expectations concerning user friendliness. Others had meant a functional overkill for us as medium-sized company, which would not have been justifiable in case of high introduction efforts“, Thaddäus Hinterberger, Head of IT at MWG BIOTECH AG, explains other decisive reasons.
Why ISE?
The long-term Oracle partner Information Systems Engineering GmbH – in short ISE – has already executed numerous Collaboration Suite projects and is experienced in integrating communication and content management infrastructures in business processes.
Despite our very complex requirements, the introduction was finalized very quickly with the help of ISE“, Thaddäus Hinterberger praises the implementation partner. „The team is very committed to our special requests and helped us very quickly in case of problems with the project.“
The implementation process
At MWG BIOTECH AG a cost-effective implementation concept was chosen, thanks to the platform independency of Oracle products, it is possible to use any Hardware. The development system was established on a computer under Linux, the migration to the SUN Solaris environment just meant an easy export/import later on.
The implementation was executed by ISE and MWG employees together. After first introduction workshops and the creation of the prototype through ISE, MWG staff took the successive extension of the portal, while ISE took care of upgrading the existing calendar and the LDAP connection to the central user register on SUN.
After successful tests and training of key-users, MWG BIOTECH AG International Intranet went live in due time 1 August, 2004.
”Of course such a platform lives from contents”, Ulrike Schramm says in closing. “However, already after closing the first phase, we received extremely positive feedback from all sides, although some contents were still missing. You can really not expect more.“
Customer Profile
MWG Biotech AG
Ebersberg bei München, Deutschland
www.the-mwg.com
Employees: 380
Turnover: Mio. EUR 43
Branch: Pharmaceutical Industry
Oracle Products & Services
Oracle 9i Application Server Portal
Oracle Collaboration Suite
Achieved improvements
- Detectable savings through considerable reduced travelling costs in the first month already
- Local Knowledge portal with integrated communication component ensures that important Know-how reaches all employees of the company
- Considerably improved communication, employees are independent of location involved in business processes.
- Decentralized administration provides scopal and always updated contents.