International Medical Equipment and Services Provider Expects Major Process Efficiency Gains From Planned ECM Deployment to All Users Globally

WATERLOO - Open Text announced that international medical equipment and services provider, B. Braun Melsungen AG, will deploy a company-wide ECM solution based on the Open Text ECM Suite. The plan represents a major expansion of the company's use of ECM from around 2,000 users currently, to all users globally when the project is fully deployed in about three years.

The key goal of the project is to streamline the management of regulated documents across the entire life cycle and to meet strict, constantly changing legal requirements in many different parts of the world concurrently. B. Braun also expects to benefit from more effective exchange of information through collaboration as well as efficient and controlled access to all process-related company documents.

"B. Braun is in a heavily regulated industry. As such, process efficiency and compliance are among our top business priorities from an IT perspective," said Steffen Epple, Director of the IT Competence Center PLM at B. Braun Melsungen AG. "Our value-added processes rely on the exchange of documents and knowledge. In order to become more efficient and effective, we needed to set up a company-wide, uniform, integrated infrastructure for content management." Like many life sciences firms, B. Braun is subject to a host of requirements from the U.S. Food & Drug Administration and the European Union to obtain approvals for new medical devices. Numerous documents and employees from all over the world are involved in the process of bringing products to market. Being able to orchestrate people, processes and content efficiently is critical to the company's success.

"We have closely followed the maturation of the Open Text offering over the last few years and have been extremely impressed," Epple said. "None of the other vendors we evaluated were able to offer a platform with comparable integration depth or as broad a functional scope. Open Text also brings a level of expertise and knowledge of our industry that will help ensure the success of this project."

Global Document Repository to Eliminate Content Silos

B. Braun is currently using a document management system from Open Text that supports around 2,000 users in the area of regulated documents. The company's remaining document inventory is distributed among various databases, file servers or e-mail systems, and must be managed manually by users. Data redundancies and inconsistencies across these silos, as well as performance problems make it impossible to perform company-wide search queries. Taking advantage of Open Text technology, such as Enterprise Library Services, B. Braun will create a central repository for all process-related company documents worldwide. This will be integrated with the Open Text archive for the SAP systems already in place and documents from other systems will also be migrated into the repository as part of the project. Additional solutions from the Open Text ECM Suite will be implemented so that the integrated services for archiving, records management, search and collaboration will be available worldwide.

The first phase of the project, which began in October, is dedicated to managing regulated documents for users in Germany, Malaysia, Spain and the U.S. The main deployment is scheduled for mid-2009 and will enable users to manage both regulated and non-regulated business documents across their entire life cycle, exchange information through forums, blogs and communities, and collaborate on projects in a more structured way. The worldwide roll-out to all users is expected to be completed by the end of 2011.