Planning for prosperity

Installation of an automated project planning system is helping Boots Healthcare International to reduce drug development cycle times and improve its competitiveness

Successful organisations cannot afford to stand still and Boots Healthcare International (BHI) is no exception. The company is one of the fastest-growing otc healthcare providers in Europe with a worldwide turnover of £308m (US$493m).

The company focuses on three areas — analgesics, upper respiratory remedies and skincare — and has introduced more than 80 new products or line extensions in the last 12 months alone.

Delivering new products to market quickly is vital to the continuing prosperity of a business. BHI typically has 50 new products in development at any one time. With the variety of tests required to bring that product to market, poor planning can significantly hinder development, which increases time to market and threatens the competitive edge of the company.

Mary Sheppard, BHI planner and development team member, has taken steps to help ensure that Boots maintains its position by consistently taking the quickest possible route to market. The project management system previously being utilised by BHI was viewed as unwieldy and complicated to use, so the planning team decided to review the options.

'What we needed,' she comments, 'was a powerful project planning tool that was simple to use and could handle multiple projects.' The team developed the product specification, met with a range of suppliers and shortlisted three options, which were subsequently tested.

But some software that initially appeared easy to use could not cope with the mix of projects required, while other products were unnecessarily complex for BHI's needs. In the end, the team chose a solution from Primavera Systems that offered the right mix of usability and project management capability. It operates across a five-user local network and is used specifically by the planners, who develop detailed timetables for individual project development programmes.

For BHI it's not just a question of allocating more people to an activity to complete it quicker. 'Drug development is essentially time dependent, either through waiting for regulatory approvals or the completion of trials,' explains Sheppard. 'While the process itself is fairly straightforward, we can never be sure just how long each stage may take to complete'

BHI has six main healthcare development teams in the UK, plus three additional skincare teams across Germany and France. Planners look after two categories in Nottingham, one on upper respiratory products and one on analgesics. Team members typically consist of staff from packaging, formulation, clinical, regulatory, quality and analytical.

The Primavera suite addresses BHI's strategic planning needs and is also ideal for monitoring day-to-day actions. Information is fed into the database, and the most commonly used report is a Gantt chart showing early and late activity dates for each project.

The BHI steering group undertook a three-month trial to make the system available to team members for direct, read-only file access. Sheppard says: 'We wanted to give people the ability to perform their own "what if" analyses to overcome situations when date changes caused activities to overlap and so threaten the overall project time cycle. During this period, product development staff were also asked to complete a questionnaire identifying the frequency with which they used the Primavera package and how it compared with the previous project management system. The results convinced the steering group to opt for 100 user licenses for the system in the UK and extend implementation to our French and German development groups.'

Sheppard believes that the software has had an enormous impact at BHI. 'Project planning is no longer being carried out on the back of an envelope and everyone who needs access to the system now has it. Planning has become high profile and the staff readily use the system to improve departmental efficiency. Every member of the team can now easily see the effect his or her work will have on each project and collaboration within and between teams has improved as a result.'

At BHI, it's not only the planners who have reaped the benefits of tighter project control. 'One of the most significant effects of applying this software,' says Sheppard, 'is that people are more familiar with the planning function and understand the effect of their work on long-term commercial objectives. Because they can see that their role is important, they are more ready to achieve target dates. Managers have also benefited in that they know project plans are based on accurate data and they in turn are more realistic, a key factor that will reduce overall product development time.'