The Challenge
Nufarm Pharmaceutical is ranked the 9th largest manufacture of crop protection products globally. Established in Australia in the 1950’s it has been innovating and manufacturing its own products for 70 years. Recently Nufarm has grown rapidly and now includes substantial operations in North and South America, Europe, New Zealand and Asia. Nufarm engaged on a drive to increase innovation among chemists when developing new products and required a knowledge management system to facilitate this.
Due to rapid global growth, Nufarm identified a risk in losing valuable corporate IP built up over many years. The challenge was identify and manage Reports and Field Trial Data, making it accessible to the global organisation. Nufarm also required an Enterprise Content and Collaboration platform to allow for the secure management and dissemination of corporate information across their global organisation. Seed Information Management was engaged to provide a collaboration system to help drive innovation and knowledge sharing throughout Nufarm.
The Solution
Seed Implemented Alfresco One to meet these challenges. The solution was deployed on AWS in order to make it globally accessible and supported SAML for cloud based Authentication. In order to drive innovation it was identified that the solution should facilitate knowledge sharing and collaboration around chemical actives and techniques used in product manufacturing. Templated Collaboration Sites were used to allow Chemists to share documents, participate in discussions and create centres of excellence bringing teams of experts together to share knowledge globally. Alfresco was customised with advanced collaboration capabilities such as tagging another chemist in a discussion which would notify them that they were requested to join in a conversation.
Seed created Sites for the Management of Reports and Studies and also Field Trial documents. In both cases the information was spread through many systems such as file systems, corporate file shares and Notes databases. A migration was carried out against each of the systems identified as holding the required content. The solution included a metadata model to allow content to be manually categorised. Synchronous Integration with the EPPO database via REST requests and Share has provided users with a straight forward way for users to apply internationally recognised EPPO codes for crops and pests to further categorise documents . The solution also created a Taxonomy structure based on categories such as active and geographical location which was automatically determined and applied based on indexing. This approach allowed users to locate the valuable Nufarm documentation in multiple ways such as browsing, using content searches, filtering by metadata and also by browsing through well understood taxonomy structures.
Everything was underpinned by Alfresco Analytics to measure the effectiveness and activity of the site.
Seed implemented Alfresco Analytics to provide analysis reporting capabilities on the usage of the system and content. This is used to measure the effectiveness and activity of the Sites being managed.
Alfresco continues to be used throughout Nufarm to manage corporate documents as part of functional business areas and collaboration on projects by Nufarm and External parties. Seed provide information governance and system management services to aid Nufarm in this.
The Results
Alfresco is used to drive innovation and speed to market of products developed at Nufarm. Chemists now have a centralised area to collaborate on product ideation and development while recording important information to increase innovation among expert teams.
Seed have brought Nufarms valuable archived documents Back to Life. Nufarm have used the advanced indexing and search capabilities of Alfresco to provide global enterprise search across up to 50 years of archived Reports and Studies. This information is used to support new product development and for pharma compliance across multiple country jurisdictions. Each report is now indexed and therefore easily found. With each report costing Tens of thousands of dollars to develop the saving to Nufarm is considerable in removing the need to repeat the studies. This has been further enhanced by the management of all historic and new content relating to field trials related to the same chemical actives used for reports.
Alfresco has been embraced throughout Nufarm for management of corporate data and has been used on multiple projects to provide an easy to use, highly secure content management system. One such transformation project resulted in savings in the order of 250 million and was used by the project team to securely collaborate with both Nufarm and external consultants to drive the required change.
"Seed did a fantastic job helping us design a collaboration system for our chemists. We had chemists around the world who now through the platform can share information, learn from each other and drive innovation for our global business. Seed's understanding of information management and their ability to take ideas and make them become a working reality was excellent. They also worked really well with our team making the adoption process easier."
Michelle Monteiro, Group Executive - Growth
Nufarm