Content Management in Regulated Environments
Life sciences companies are under increasing pressure to effectively manage the information they produce to reduce compliance risks, improve product submissions and increase the speed and quality of the product development and manufacturing lifecycles. Given these requirements, effective and controlled content management is becoming more and more important throughout the industry.
Life sciences: a content-critical industry
According to a recent release from Accenture, people around the world will create more content in the next two years than in all of our previous history. The vast majority of this new information will be in electronic formats as varied as images, text documents, Web pages, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, drawings, e-mail and instant messages, video and multimedia.
Managing all of this content will be complex and difficult for organizations. But manage it they must, especially when competing in an industry where strict regulatory mandates and heated market competition is facts of daily business life. FDA 21 CFR Part 11 has a particularly broad impact as it affects electronic records stored in databases as well as those created by word processing, spreadsheet, and graphics programs.
Also driving content management is the need to exert control over the growing volume of records and documents, with the direct benefits of reducing task duplication and minimizing the time employees spend looking for out-of-date documents or recreating documents. Managing content helps ensure that the right information in the right format reaches the right decision makers.
The ease with which information workers can exchange information with data sources and document management systems is an important measure of how well an organization can transform its information workers into consumers of information and producers of business intelligence. And the more business intelligence an enterprise produces, the healthier its bottom line.
How InfoStrength Smart Enterprise Suite tames the information flood
A comprehensive content management solution helps users cope with three potential problem areas of information management:
- Consistency of content.
Most life sciences companies lack a structured authoring environment that allows forms-based data entry and where templates have defined editable areas. The result is templates that vary in form and frequently break. InfoStrength Smart Enterprise Suite can provide the needed consistency, while making it possible to create intelligent documents without major customization.
- Location of content.
Typically, content is stored in dozens, even hundreds, of locations within a single company. InfoStrength Smart Enterprise Suite can provide a central trusted repository for content, which is of critical importance when the content is subject to regulation.
- Status of content.
InfoStrength Smart Enterprise Suite is extensive, allowing the moving and tracking of information from creation and capture, to management, to sharing and collaboration, to publication and finally to archiving or disposal. With InfoStrength Smart Enterprise Suite it is easy to identify authoritative original documents, as opposed to copies, and to give authorized users access to them.
InfoStrength Smart Enterprise Suite succeeds because it has been
- Designed for widespread user adoption.
InfoStrength Smart Enterprise Suite fosters user acceptance with an interface that is fully integrated with the user’s environment, including any application running on the desktop. Integration with familiar tools enables users to benefit from InfoStrength Smart Enterprise Suite without having to change the way they work or to undergo extensive training
- Designed to deliver an integrated solution.
InfoStrength Smart Enterprise Suite architecture provides a common set of services and a unified storage infrastructure, ensuring integration and consistency across the system. New functionality can be added without redesigning the underlying infrastructure. InfoStrength Smart Enterprise Suite supports the work of individuals, teams and business units on intranet, extranet and internet sites without requiring the use of disparate systems.
Although content management might seem a daunting task, InfoStrength Smart Enterprise Suite is the right solution that can become integral both to business processes and business success. By carefully considering the various components of content management, as well as the unique needs of users, Infostrength has come up with a solution that almost guarantees a quick return on investment.
The explosion of content in all its various forms and formats, including Web, paper, wireless and other digital assets, has pushed the effective management of corporate content to new heights on the business agenda. This has created business challenges across industries. These are a few we hear from the market:
- Finding the right information is just too hard.
- My people spend a significant amount of their time looking for the information they need to help them do work.
- Our business is complex and it takes forever to get our new people up to speed.
- We have high turnover in key areas and critical knowledge is walking out the door.
- We don't do a good job of leveraging the information we share with our partners.
- We spend way too much on managing information and don't get the ROI we should.
InfoStrength Smart Enterprise Suite addresses these challenges head-on. InfoStrength Smart Enterprise Suite provide business users with rapid access to the information and services they need to help them do their jobs more efficiently, make better-informed business decisions and enable their organizations to become smarter, thus more competitive.