Monsanto is a global life sciences company providing agricultural, pharmaceutical, and nutritional products. The company's pharmaceutical sector was facing the challenge of global launches of multiple healthcare products in an industry where new product introductions can change a company's market position in a relatively short period of time. The speed and cohesiveness of its product launches will continue to enable Monsanto to gain a competitive advantage. Waterstone Consulting was instrumental in enabling critical components of Monsanto's Knowledge Network to support these new product introductions.
Executive Summary

Business Strategy

Waterstone Consulting's experience in developing mission-critical knowledge management solutions enabled them to rapidly determine the key project initiatives that would deliver Monsanto high business value:

• Reduce access time to critical product and market information throughout the product lifecycle
• Leverage 'best practices' across the organization
• Provide the capability to shorten product-to-market timeframes
• Improve reaction times to market changes
• Enable more proactive market planning

Technology Strategy

Monsanto's first step was to establish a cross-functional group representing areas such as product development, product support, and medical marketing. In partnership with Waterstone Consulting, this team identified best practices within each of these functional areas to support global product launches.

Once these were defined, Waterstone Consulting began development of the knowledge-enabled solutions. These solutions provide easy access to crucial product and market information and ensure the consistent mobilization of the global product launch teams in executing their business strategies. Using the existing network infrastructure linking locations in the U.S., Canada and Europe, Waterstone Consulting built a powerful intranet site that greatly reduced access time to much-needed information. By effectively 'pooling' together data retained in eight separate applications, the global teams are now able to utilize a broad range of product and market data through a single, seamless point of access.

The underlying architecture of the new intranet system has a robust security model which protects sensitive, proprietary information while providing flexible presentation capabilities. A variety of users, from research and development to medical marketing, can quickly view critical product information with 'customized' interfaces. A Lotus Notes Domino system manages extranet access and enables remote users to easily access, analyze, and develop market data.

Project Approach

Process-oriented, global initiatives such as development and implementation of Monsanto's knowledge-enabled solutions requires coordinated support across a variety of functions, departments, and locations. Waterstone's approach in teaming with the client to understand their business, help manage internal change, and promote acceptance and use of the new knowledge management systems ensured the project's success.

Project Success

With significant progress toward its high performance goals and intranet/extranet technologies in place, Monsanto is realizing bottom-line impact from its knowledge management capabilities. For example, remote users in certain product launch and support functions can now access and develop critical product and market information in one day. The previous process could have taken up to two months.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Industry:	Benefit:
Life Sciences: Pharmaceuticals	Provided capability to shorten product-to-market cycles Built Global, 24X7 access to product and market information. Improved response times to market conditions
Solution:	Technology:
Knowledge Management	Oracle database, Lotus Notes & Domino Server, Intranet and Extranet, Dynamic Website, Documentum document management, Active Server Pages, 3-Tiered Client Server Architecture