European Pharmaceutical Group

A pharmaceutical group based in Europe with world wide facilities and over 1 billion Euros in 2005 revenue deployed Traction® TeamPage enterprise blog software as a Competitive Intelligence platform. Traction enables a collective intelligence process spanning business functions and time zones. The system enables market and competitive information, analysis and commentary to flow more freely in order to support timely, informed decision making processes and increased market awareness.

This customer's story was covered in detailed case study by Suw Charman of Corante. See, 13 June 2005 | Dark Blogs Case Study #1 - A European Pharmaceutical Group for a link to Suw's executive summary and the PDF of the report.

Traction was deployed to over 250 named users who have access to permission protected blog spaces covering specific therapeutic areas, while a general market blog is open to the 4000+ employees around the world.

Suw reports that the CIO chose Traction TeamPage for a number of reasons:

• the format was ideal for the type of competitive intelligence material they were collating
• it was easy to implement and could be tightly integrated with existing business systems, such as the LDAP corporate directory, Lotus Notes and Microsoft Office
• it supports unlimited, individually permissioned blogs within a single, integrated installation
• it supports user permissions across reading, authoring, editing and commenting functions on a blog by blog basis
• the publishing process allows for collaborative editing
• it was easy to use and required minimal training, thus lowering the bar for adoption
• it was low cost to buy, deploy and manage

“The blog format lends itself particularly well to the type of material that we're producing,” said the CIO. “Competitive information is always very unstructured and comes in lots of different ways — through the internet, internal sources, and various other ways. Using blogs to organise the data is quite effective because it doesn't impose too rigid a structure where we need some inherent flexibility."

Two years after its initial deployment and 15 months after pilot launch, the system contains over 4,000 posts across 6 integrated Traction blogs, has encouraged market relevant communication to center on the blog vs. travel through email, and has become a proven best practice for knowledge management at the company.