Adobe Success Story

Leading consumer goods manufacturer streamlined and enhanced security of research and development processes with Adobe LiveCycle solutions

Bringing products to market
Procter & Gamble (P&G) has one of the strongest portfolios of brands, including Pampers, Tide, Pantene, Mach3, Crest, and Charmin. Included in P&G’s portfolio are a variety of prescription and over-the-counter medicines. The company develops many of these treatments in partnership with outside drug research specialists.

The process of discovering new medical treatments involves a constant exchange of information among clinicians, researchers, quality control staff, marketing specialists, and dozens of other internal staff and external partners. In addition, P&G works closely with government regulators to ensure that products meet stringent safety and efficacy criteria.

Benefits

• Control over research documents
• Reduced administrative time spent by scientists by as much as 10% weekly
• Saved millions of dollars annually
• Accelerated R&D
• Improved tracking and signature compliance

Project Details

In the pharmaceuticals sector, speed to market is critical. It not only ensures that consumers can get new treatments sooner, it can also have an important financial impact, especially because successful treatments can garner worldwide sales of more than $1 million a day.

A primary challenge is, of course, that only a small percentage of treatments ever make it to market, making it essential that everyone involved in product development can quickly and efficiently create and review research and development information. As a result, many bio-pharmaceutical companies are looking to automate manual processes involving paper.

Accelerating R&D
To improve its processes for bringing new products to market, P&G worked with Cardinal Solutions, a leading IT solutions provider and systems integrator, to implement Adobe LiveCycle Reader Extensions and Adobe LiveCycle PDF Generator. P&G used the solutions as part of its eLab Notebook program that streamlined creating, managing, reviewing, approving, and signing the large volume of research and development information.

Previously, researchers had to use paper notebooks to record experiment information. Each page would have to be numbered, signed by the researcher, and then signed by a witness. “The eLab Notebook enabled researchers to use common tools to collect data,” says Kay Bross, former senior PKI specialist of Information Security and Solutions at P&G and a leading proponent of the SAFE-BioPharma Association digital standard that helps ensure secure and trusted communication throughout electronic processes.

After the data was collected, Adobe LiveCycle PDF Generator created an Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) document and enabled researchers to digitally apply their signatures. Next, Adobe LiveCycle Reader Extensions embedded usage rights within the Adobe PDF document that activated Adobe Reader functionality. When Adobe PDF files were sent for review, recipients that needed to sign the file could do so digitally using ubiquitous and free Adobe Reader software.

The eLab Notebook solution used Adobe LiveCycle software to apply digital signatures to research documents that were compliant with the SAFE-BioPharma standard. “Adobe responded to our need for a system compliant with SAFE-BioPharma,” says Bross. “The automated system also drove compliance by reminding researchers when they needed to get SAFE-BioPharma digital signatures to move forward with their projects.”

Supporting information archival
The benefits of the Adobe LiveCycle solutions went beyond helping to safeguard workflows by also saving P&G time and money on administrative activities. Previously, researchers could spend hours each week archiving data from every experiment in three-ring binders, which required a great deal of storage space and made it difficult to locate old records and leverage previous work in current projects.

“The time, cost of the space, and drain on resources to manage and retrieve paper files were huge, growing expenses,” says Bross. “Using Adobe LiveCycle PDF Generator to create an electronic PDF archive saved the cost of physically storing project information and created an accurate, searchable electronic record. It was a huge benefit to researchers.”

Accurate, reliable information exchange
With Adobe LiveCycle PDF Generator, P&G could quickly produce the large volume of materials required to communicate drug research information to government regulators. Because PDF is an accepted standard for submitting materials to the U.S. FDA and other government agencies, the ability to quickly and reliably convert all content to Adobe PDF files was essential.

Approximately 4,500 to 5,000 P&G scientists around the world involved in product development used this system. The Adobe solutions were integrated with a UGS Teamcenter system for managing research data and documents.

One of P&G’s marketing departments in Germany also used the Adobe solution for authorizing instructions designating how products should be displayed. Using Adobe Acrobat Professional software, configured with the SAFE-BioPharma signature button on the tool bar, employees could obtain the signatures they needed to move forward with projects. Increasingly, the company found that the SAFE-BioPharma signature capability could be applied across multiple business units.

Significant savings
An initial study of anticipated savings from the eLab Notebook initiative estimated an overall productivity gain of 5%. However, actual productivity realized by the solution for some early adopters was approximately 10%, translating to as much as four hours per week of time for each researcher. This savings—combined with a projected 7% productivity gain due to the ability to more easily and reliably reuse knowledge across experiments—added up to millions of dollars in savings per year for the company.

“We chose to go with a single solution for all research areas, so there would be one searchable archive of PDF files and a common set of tools for everyone,” explains Bross. “We knew we couldn’t get the return we wanted if we didn’t adopt a fully electronic solution. Adobe LiveCycle solutions were integral to our success.”

---

Do you have a story you would like to share? Join the Adobe Customer Reference Program.