Customer Solution Case Study
/ / Medical Technology Company BD Gains Strategic View of $400 Million R&D Portfolio
Overview
Country or Region: United States
Industry: Life sciences—Medical devices
Customer Profile
BD, a global medical technology company, manufactures and sells medical supplies, devices, laboratory equipment, and diagnostic products. Headquartered in Franklin Lakes, New Jersey, BD employs more than 28,000 associates in nearly 50 countries.
Business Situation
With an R&D budget that doubled to U.S.$400 million in just a few years, BD wanted stronger analytics in place to aid in decision making on its R&D investment portfolio.
Solution
BD deployed the Microsoft® Enterprise Project Management (EPM) Solution. UMT Consulting Group helped BD define valuable metrics as well as create advanced analytics and reporting structures for the EPM solution.
Benefits
Total visibility into $400 million R&D fund
Clarification of business strategy
Timelier decision making
Optimal return on investment / “After implementing the EPM Solution, we are now able to provide the leadership at BD with deeper visibility into our $400 million R&D fund.”
Jeff DiPasquale, Global IT Portfolio Manager, BD
Medical technology company BD (Becton, Dickinson and Company) serves healthcare institutions, life science researchers, clinical laboratories, the pharmaceutical industry, and the general public. While R&D spending at BD grew rapidly, the company’s ability to analyze projects and investments lagged behind. BD needed a tool that would provide a companywide view of all projects, associated costs, and resources. The company chose the Microsoft® Office Enterprise Project Management (EPM) Solution. With the standardized metrics and advanced analytics provided byimplementation partner UMT Consulting Group, the EPM Solution offers many benefits. The company now has a comprehensive view into its U.S.$400 million R&D budget, giving BD the information it needs to measure its investments against its stated strategy, make timelier decisions, and maximize its return on investment.
Situation
BD is a global medical technology company that focuses on improving drug delivery and disease diagnosis as well as advancing drug discovery. BD develops, manufactures, and sells medical supplies, devices, laboratory instruments, antibodies, reagents, and diagnostic products. It serves healthcare organizations, life science researchers, clinical laboratories, the pharmaceutical industry, and the general public.
In February 2007, BD decided that it needed to implement a companywide project portfolio management methodology to optimally manage its large investment portfolio in research and development. “Our R&D budget had doubled from $200 million to $400 million in just a few years,” says Jeff DiPasquale, Global IT Portfolio Manager at BD.
Although BD could perform R&D investment analysis within its individual 9 organizational units, DiPasquale says, “It was difficult to compare apples to apples across units. Therefore we needed to improve our portfolio management process and also automate this process by selecting a tool that would help us view our investments and make decisions about these investments at a corporate level.”
To help achieve the needed standardization, make more informed decisions, and calculate return on investment, BD began by improving the portfolio management components of its companywide global product development system (GPDS). The system tracks the distinct phases of the product development life cycle, from concept through launch. “We created a staged approach for product development that also linked associated expenses and resources,” says DiPasquale.
Scott Bruder, MD, PhD, Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at BD, continues: “As we refined GPDS, we realized that we needed a project management tool that would be flexible enough to follow the product development process while taking us to the next level of business intelligence internally. We wanted to know, for example, what information is used at the local organizational unit level to make portfolio decisions? Who makes those decisions, and what types of information and analysis would help us manage the broader portfolio in line with our strategic goals?”
Solution
BD was looking for a solution that supported the three Gs that are drivers behind the company’s global project portfolio management initiative:
Global governance—adherence to the GPDS within the project management tool
Global harmonization—the use of standardized metrics and calculations across all organizational units
Global transparency—the consolidation of all investments and valuations within one system to give stakeholders the information necessary for making effective portfolio decisions
After evaluating several vendors, BD chose the Microsoft® Office Enterprise Project Management (EPM) Solution, which includes Microsoft Office Project Portfolio Server 2007, Microsoft Office Project Server 2007, and Microsoft Office Project Professional 2007. “We chose the EPM Solution based on three primary requirements,” says DiPasquale. “We needed a solution that was flexible enough to customize workflows. Our goal was to deploy first to R&D, and then to extend the investment by deploying to other functions like IT.” For security purposes, BD required the ability to configure user access according to specific criteria to ensure that people only had access to the portfolios that matched their job responsibilities. “Lastly,” says DiPasquale, “we wanted a credible, established vendor in which we had confidence. Microsoft met all of these criteria.” BD also required the solution to link data from other Microsoft products such as Microsoft Office Enterprise 2007 and Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007.
BD partnered with UMT Consulting Group to define goals and metrics and to create advanced analytics and reports. UMT Consulting Group designed and built UMT Portfolio Manager, which Microsoft purchased in 2006 as the foundation for Microsoft Office Project Portfolio Server 2007. Headquartered in New York City, UMT Consulting Group is a global services provider and Microsoft Gold Certified Partner specializing in project and portfolio management. The company is recognized internationally as a market leader and has successfully implemented project and portfolio management solutions with global organizations for more than twenty years.
“We worked with each of the 9 organizational units to understand the data standards and components in Office Project Portfolio Server 2007 that BD wanted to create,” says Tom Malfi, Partner and Engagement Manager at UMT Consulting Group.
With the help of UMT Consulting Group, the EPM Solution at BD:
Collects standardized data and metrics for each BD R&D project.
Prioritizes strategic company business drivers and shows how each BD project aligns with each strategic driver.
Evaluates and prioritizes projects based on user-defined goals, including maximizing strategic value and financial value while reducing technical and commercial risks.
Provides the ability to analyze projects based on user-specified “what if” scenarios such as changes in resources, strategic goals, and budgets.
Provides many advanced decision-making tools such as the graphical analysis for return on investment presented in an Office Project Portfolio Server 2007 feature called “Efficient Frontier.”
BD deployed the solution to R&D in two major phases. Once established in R&D, “We decided to further gain value from the EPM solution by deploying similar portfolio management capabilities to the IT organization thereby providing a common framework to manage both R&D and IT project-type investments,” says DiPasquale. Recently, BD extended the solution to its research arm, BD Technologies.
Benefits
The EPM Solution at BD, designed and configured by UMT Consulting Group, provides the company with total visibility into its $400 million R&D budget. The solution helps BD to measure its investments against its strategy, make timelier decisions, and maximize the value it receives in return for each dollar it spends.
Total Visibility into $400 Million R&D Fund
Before implementing the EPM Solution, BD did not have a “single source of truth” for all of its projects. “At the corporate level, BD probably had a good understanding of the top 25 things that were critical to the business, but it did not have total visibility into all of its projects,” says Malfi.
With the EPM Solution designed and configured by UMT Consulting Group, “BD now has a single source of truth for all new product development projects,” says DiPasquale. “After implementing the EPM Solution, we are now able to provide the leadership at BD with deeper visibility into our $400 million R&D fund.”
Clarification of Business Strategy
The transparency of all projects, finances, and resources helps BD to clarify its business strategy. “Every project in one of our organizational units, when viewed in isolation for that unit, may make sense. But when you look at that unit’s list of projects with respect to the aggregate of all BD projects, they may not make as much sense,” says Bruder. “Perhaps they don’t provide a sufficient return on investment, or they might not meet certain criteria. The analytical tools in the EPM Solution give us a window into viewing these potential outcomes, which helps us drive our business strategy more efficiently. The solution gives us the data that we need to ask ourselves interesting and challenging questions inside our business.”
Timelier Decision Making
The company’s previous conglomeration of stand-alone tracking methods significantly constrained its ability to perform companywide analysis and make timely decisions. Since implementing the EPM Solution, BD’s organizational units are tracking their projects with fresh diligence. “We see the value in using the tool and following the process because doing so gives those in a decision-making capacity the ability to discuss the implications of the data,” says Bruder. “It arms us to go back to the units and ask clarifying questions to a degree that we could not have done previously. This valuable directional information, provided by the EPM Solution, helps us make more strategic, and more timely, decisions.”
Optimal Return on Investment
The EPM Solution provides many ways for BD to analyze and prioritize its investment strategy. One of the most useful features for BD is the Efficient Frontier Analysis. “This is a line graph that shows, at different points along the curve, the value that the company is receiving, or would receive, in proportion to the amount of money spent,” says Malfi. “A company will not want to spend a great deal of money for only an incremental value increase, so this is critical business intelligence. The Efficient Frontier Analysis provided by the EPM Solution easily and clearly shows the return on investment that BD can get out of its product development portfolio.”
BD continues to optimize the solution for all levels of the business. DiPasquale concludes, “Currently, we’re looking at how our organizations can extend this technology into other functions in order to support our goal of establishing a common investment decision-making process.”
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