PharmaView: With BPM, Wyeth Automates and Empowers

Drug manufacturers have always struggled to make workers’ performance consistent across various sites and countries. The secrets of a highly functioning team in Country A may never get translated to teams in Countries B, C, and D.

This challenge has motivated the rise in business process management (BPM). What is BPM? “It’s about understanding and optimizing our business processes to drive operational excellence across the company,” says Jeffrey Hamilton, Wyeth’s VP of Information Services. “It begins with clearly mapping our processes, removing non-value added activities and, finally, applying automation where appropriate to drive the greatest business value” and thus leverage BPM tools.

“Several years ago, we decided as a company to standardize business processes on a global scale,” Hamilton says. The goals were to achieve consistency and efficiency, and provide employees with easy access to real-time data and business metrics to run the business. “As we rolled out standard end-to-end business processes to users, BPM tools enabled users to see the big picture and put their role in context by understanding upstream and downstream process and data flows.”

Wyeth already used systems like SAP and Documentum for workflow management, and BPM techniques were used to lay the business process foundation on which these and other systems were built and integrated.

“Process automation links many elements together, whether human to human or human to system.”

 The company uses different BPM software solutions in a variety of ways, Hamilton explains—for example, process modeling (e.g., ARIS Solutions), and process automation and understanding (e.g., Metastorm). Supply chain optimization is one area of application. “We now have full [product] genealogy from the time we receive a raw material from a vendor through product distribution,” Hamilton says.

Contrary to common perception, business process management is not a single IT tool, much less even an IT solution, says Jazz Tobaccowalla, Wyeth’s Executive VP of R&D Information Systems. “It’s not that the IT element is taken out of it,” he says, “but process automation links many elements together, whether human to human or human to system.”

Another BPM success that Wyeth has achieved is in the area of clinical trials, automating payments to investigating physicians. “We set up a whole host of business roles that physicians were using to send us information and connected them to the payment system,” Tobaccowalla explains. The use of the BPM software for this purpose has also given Wyeth robust insight into, running effective trials, and meeting deadlines.

What started as a few test projects has snowballed into a corporatewide effort, whose epicenter is a new BPM Center of Excellence. BPM has become ingrained in Wyeth’s corporate culture, Tobaccowalla says, allowing employees across departments and facilities to communicate in a medium of process optimization and continuous improvement. As it has taken on a life of its own, BPM becomes more sustainable. A given project is centered upon individual involvement and sharing, but is not beholden to any one individual for success.

And the growth of BPM at Wyeth has been more organic than immaculately planned, he says. “Some projects we just looked at more quickly than others,” he says. “If you spend an extraordinary amount of time up front in planning, it never seems to quite work out. You miss that human element within the perfect automation.”

Fit for Manufacturing?
Wyeth has used BPM in manufacturing plants and across its supply chain to standardize critical business processes and enable global visibility of operational performance. For example, Hamilton explains, Wyeth has used BPM techniques to link together plants and markets around the world “enabling our plants to have visibility to the inventory position and forecasted demand in each market,” enhancing agility.   

BPM integrates with Wyeth’s SAP enterprise system. In the example of the clinical trial investigator payments, the BPM software manages interactions with the physicians, and once the physician has fulfilled his or her responsibilities, the BPM informs SAP and triggers the payment process.

Where BPM has been widely adopted at Wyeth, but could be effective in helping a broader set of Pharma companies, is to integrate and manage communications between various manufacturing-related systems, such as LIMS, MES, and an ERP. “Now that we have a proven model that’s driving business value at Wyeth with integrated, standard systems based on BPM techniques, our employees are just pulling them into the plants,” says Hamilton.

Why has BPM been slow to catch on in pharma? It’s a combination of things, Tobaccowalla says. Silos across departments and sites—the kind which BPM is designed to help break down—slow its adoption. And maybe some manufacturers have not been able to see the forest for the trees. “In our world, a lot of our focus has always been on core transaction systems,” he adds. For many manufacturers, getting these systems down pat was enough. “But once you get that correct, then you can look at the flow of information across these systems. . . . It’s not the data in the transaction systems but what you can view and use in a timely manner."