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"Xiprean.com is our Organisation - as simple as that"
Juergen Raths (JR), Managing Director Critical Care Europe, Eli Lilly
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This interview was conducted by:
Markus Hegi, Founder & CEO Colayer
Sampada Nagavkar, Management Member Colayer
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Terms used:
Critical Care Europe (CCE) -
Sales and Marketing Business Unit of Eli Lilly for hospital products ReoPro, Xigris and Oncology.
Employees: 300
Yearly revenue: 300 Million USD
Xiprean.com: A web communication and collaboration portal, run by Colayer and based on the metalayer/Colayer platform.
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JR: The Eli Lilly Critical Care Europe Organization is the European marketing and sales business unit for hospital products of Eli Lilly. Our main two products are ReoPro, a cardio-vascular drug used for the treatment of patients suffering from AMI in the cathlab, and Xigris, an ICU drug for the treatment of severe sepsis. Critical Carers currently operate the whole of Western Europe. Our headquarters are based in Geneva where our Customer Service Center is based. Our CSC operates on a 24/7 basis and provides health professionals from across Europe with immediate customer support services in more than 15 languages.
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JR: Our business unit is organized on a European level - there are no country structures in our decision and main operational processes. The common organization for pharmaceutical marketing and sales organizations is the country organization. The "European Model" makes sense, Whenever you know and interact directly with the final customers. It makes less sense for OTC drugs (over-the-counter), but rather for specialized hospital products, where direct customer contact (to the hospital and the specialist doctors) is key for the business. Speed of solution really matters to our customers - to be in close interaction with the physicians, to listen to their needs, to support them finding individual solutions with a professional Pan-European organization and to share key learnings throughout Europe and between customers.
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JR: We have started implementing it in 1999 - Eli Lilly was organized in a country organization, and the European knowledge exchange was limited and slow. Reaction speed and the time to update the organization about the market was just too slow. We started that time with a Pan-European organization for one drug (ReoPro). 2002, Xigris and Oncology got integrated into CCE. As far as I know, we were the first company in our segment to implement this European model. Today, I know of two of our competitors who are working on implementing the same model.
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JR: The speed of knowledge flow and the speed a professional organization with a European network can respond to individual customer needs. Our customers are defined by potentials and not anymore by passports. We identify the largest potential and focus our main efforts on them, no matter where they are located.
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JR: Xiprean.com is our organization - as simple as that. It is our office, our workplace. Critical Care Europe doesn't "have" a web portal, but the portal is our organization. Once all main communication goes through the portal, once all main knowledge and the full history of the organization is stored within the portal, and once all skills and capabilities of the organization are documented and mapped in the portal, the portal becomes the organization itself.
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JR: The "European Model" would not be possible without an efficient communication tool like Xiprean.com - Communication within our organization is truly two ways, many to many - within the organization, as well as with customers and partners. This gives especially to marketing a very different role. Marketing in CCE is not anymore a one way process, but it is a highly interactive process. You put information on the portal, you get instant reactions of co-workers and customers, and you better react on these ...
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JR: Siebel is like a telephone book of our customers, metalayer/Colayer like our yellow pages. The Siebel system is a great tool to store and retrieve information about customers, and the system is organized according to our customers. The metalayer/Colayer platform is organized differently: according to the areas of expertise in our organization and the working areas. Xiprean.com is everything the organization knows!
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JR: It is the only place within the Lilly world where you can easily find all updated marketing plans, business plans, all major documents. If you need anything, you mostly find it on the portal. If you have information, you put it on the portal and you are sure that anyone will find it at anytime. You also get clean and direct information about the different sales meetings, protocols, summaries of discussions etc.
We also heavily use this tool for our virtual meetings. For this year's business plans for example we did not have one single physical meeting. We met online, on the meeting tools of Xiprean.com. The portal gives us a combination of synchronous virtual meetings and asynchronous information sharing and discussions. This saved 4 weeks of time for the CCE management.
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JR: The management is still meeting - you can not fully build and maintain trusted relationships online - for this, we meet from time to time, but not mainly to discuss business, but we go for example hiking or mountain climbing together - building trust. Tomorrow for example I climb Mont Blanc with some managers. Then, we all go back to our home countries, connect to Xiprean.com and work.
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JR: This tool helped us to reduce our travel cost (nearly 100'000 dollars per year), saved travel time for people - but of course the tangible cost saving is not the important value of the portal. The real difference, the portal does by giving us a speed and a closeness to customers, which no other tool I know would allow us. It gives a transparency within a distributed organization and reduced the chaos of email communication. And most of all: The portal fundamentally changed the way we co-work together and the corporate culture of CCE.
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JR: This tool brings a fundamental change in the organizational hierarchy. Everybody gets an equal share of the voice, there are almost no privileges of information in CCE - and everyone has the possiblity to transparently talk to the organization. The tool facilitates a highly transparent and sharing work environment, and allows especially a much better integration of the periphery.
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JR: Transparency - and this affects everyone. The way we interact with customer has changed. Today the customer often tells us directly on the comties what he wants, and the organization is listening - this saves a huge cycles of gathering information from the market and re-distributing them into the organization. Xiprean does not allow to keep the information only with a few people, but really enables and sometimes even "enforces" sharing with everybody. This may not be nice for every employee, who considers his knowledge his power and is afraid of loosing that power by sharing the information he has. This transparent sharing culture is however a immense advantage for the organization.
Everybody can see what someone else writes, everyone can see, who is currently online, and even the context another person is in: where this person currently is, what she/he is reading, working on etc.
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JR: It gives us an exponential increase in speed -
There is definitively much more direct communication, cross hierarchy and functional levels - In CCE, every employee knows my personal agenda. Every employee knows, what I am doing, what is important for me and what are my current priorities. I personally don't know any other organization or General Manager which this is the case. Xiprean is also a self selective tool. It gives an additional transparency to the management too. Employees are not able to 'hide', but everyone can transparently see the contributions and values a person is providing to the company. Employes which are not online will not be in the organization for a long time. If you don't share, you can't stay. It increases also the speed of managing the organization.
Transparency only works in both ways - if you as a manager want transparency, you have to live a very transparent style yourself. And it gives very direct and immediate feedback from the organization to the management. I'm often astonished, how much the managemen misses the mark, if I realize on Xiprean.com, what the employees and the organization really needs and wants.
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JR: Oh, this thing is really social! Just go on a Sunday evening 10 pm on Xiprean.com and see how many people are logged into the portal, and what they do there! This tool is very social, it helps people to come together socially, small talk, share learnings or just personal things. It allows an extremely flexible workstyle, and many employees go online late night, after spending the evening with the family, preparing the next day. Xiprean.com is our workplace, our office and it becomes more and more also our place for social interaction.
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