Fujisawa Pharmaceuticals Grows OTC Sales With Speed, Focus, and Flexibility

Snapshot

Organization Fujisawa Pharmaceutical, based in Osaka, Japan, and founded in 1894, is a leading pharmaceutical manufacturer with international operations in North America, Europe, and Asia. Its OTC Drugs Division targets the Japanese market.

The Challenge Cut costs and increase productivity of OTC sales support system for managers and sales reps.

The Strategy Migrate mainframe and client-server technologies to the Web and wireless devices for fast, flexible, focused sales support.

The Results Developed Web-based system for reporting in four months that is up to 10 times more productive for development of applications; provides more than 200 users with over 300 reports; improved usage efficiency; lowered operating costs; and provides better content with Excel capabilities.

Information Builders Solution WebFOCUS, ReportCaster.

The Fujisawa Pharmaceutical Company states that its mission is "to provide new, innovative products that contribute to the health and welfare of people all over the world by exploring the frontiers of human health and disease."

The Over-the-Counter (OTC) Drugs Division is helping the company meet that goal by improving the health and efficiency of its sales support system, keeping it up-to-date with the latest technologies for real-time information delivery.

The OTC Division sells non-prescription drug and medical supplies to franchise drug stores and retail pharmacies in Japan. It's a high-volume, low-margin business that demands highly efficient operations and sales support.

Using Information Builders' technologies, Fujisawa developed the Computer-Aided Promotion (CAP) system to respond to the challenges. The system contains sales results, product, organization, and customer data – around 30 million records – in an Oracle database. Over 200 people, including 100 sales representatives, use CAP.

Takashi Mizukami, senior manager of Management Information Systems, reports that "one user often makes 200 requests a day, but it's no problem; the system can handle it." The system even supports users making queries from cell phones.

Most importantly, the system has cut costs and improved efficiency as it has grown and provided even better sales support.

How has the division's Management Information Systems group made this possible? By growing the system organically to make the best use of the latest developments in technology.

Natural Evolution

The OTC Drugs Division has been using Information Builders' technologies for more than 14 years, from mainframe to client/server to Web. As the system has grown and demands from users have increased, each step of the way the Management Information Systems team has been quick to adapt. The decision to move to the Web grew out of the desire to control costs and improve the productivity of client/server applications as more people used the system more often, and the volume of data usage grew.

To choose the software for building a Web-based reporting system, the team considered the following criteria:

Ability to improve developer productivity

Ability to handle voluminous data searches

Ability to manipulate the data in Excel

Ability to provide multiple functions required by diverse users

When Mizukami and his group learned about Information Builders' WebFOCUS real-time information delivery technology, they knew they had found their answer.

They could improve developer productivity by drawing on existing expertise with Information Builders' technology and reusing some of the same procedures, comments, and reports.

They could handle the volume of demand by scheduled processing and efficiently extracting data that had been impossible to obtain by SQL matching and secondary searches.

They could easily download search results into Excel.

They could provide all levels of users with all the types of reporting they would need: static reporting for the 60 percent of users who just needed simple reports on current situations, parameter-driven reporting for the 30 percent who needed to examine the data from more angles, and summary reporting, ad hoc query, and OLAP for the 10 percent who wanted to do more analysis on their own.

Rapid Growth

Once the Management Information System team decided to use WebFOCUS to migrate the CAP system to the Web, it took just four months to implement. As Mizukami says, "It's easy to develop."

The Fujisawa team began by developing two types of reports:

Dynamic reports that are automatically generated by WebFOCUS in HTML and can be run from the Web on demand by any user

Batch reports that are run on a schedule; these batch reports converted the spread-sheets from the previous system into Excel, a function critical to users

Eight months later the group expanded the system further: They made it possible for users to conduct queries from their cell phones.

Japan has some of the most highly developed wireless technology in the world. Mizukami explains, "In Japan, the cell phone is a mobile device for business – not handhelds, as in the U.S. They are very thin, very little. It's standard for Japanese people to use them for e-mail, for browsing, for the Web. So our salespeople have them, and now they can access WebFOCUS reports from them."

This mobilization of the CAP system makes it possible for Fujisawa's sales reps and managers to use their cell phones to check sales revenue and inventory daily. "The system is entirely the same using the cell phone or the PC's Web browser," says Mizukami.

Four months later, the team introduced a function for market analysis by geographic location with inventory movement data. Using the system, salespeople can look at a map and see which pharmacy has how much revenue.

In just another two months, the team began using the ReportCaster feature of WebFOCUS to give them even more flexibility for delivering reports to users. With ReportCaster, they can "push" reports to users via e-mail – both scheduled batch reports and reports triggered in response to alert conditions.

Improved Performance

The reason the system has grown is simple: It works. "The end users like the WebFOCUS system," explains Mizukami. "WebFOCUS is easy to develop in and easy to use." As a result, "productivity has improved drastically since switching from SQL tools to WebFOCUS."

Using SQL tools in the previous client/server system, it took two months to develop five to six programs. After introducing WebFOCUS, Mizukami and his team developed 70 programs in two months – 10 times as efficient.

Now when a developer or staff member has an idea, it's easy to develop the procedures.

The Management Information System team also provided mobile access to the data, greatly improving sales support. In addition, by providing reports in Excel – the preferred format for most of their users – they gave users more power to analyze the data on their own and display it in a visually effective way.

At the same time, they improved the overall operating efficiency of the system, consolidating their servers and improving load distribution through scheduling efficiencies.

The OTC Drugs Division keeps growing steadily, and its systems grow with it, setting a pace that helps the rest of Fujisawa.

In fact, the Computer-Aided Promotion system is working so well for sales support in the OTC Drugs Division that Fujisawa is expanding it to help manage all aspects of its daily OTC business, including financial reporting and drug development. Fujisawa's main division – ethical drugs – is now also beginning to develop an information delivery system using WebFOCUS.

When asked how the system is performing for Fujisawa, Mizukami sums it all up: "Excellent."

	They could improve developer productivity by drawing on existing expertise with Information Builders' technology and reusing some of the same procedures, comments, and reports.
	They could handle the volume of demand by scheduled processing and efficiently extracting data that had been impossible to obtain by SQL matching and secondary searches.
	They could easily download search results into Excel.