Better uptime at pharma firm

5 November 2009

Boehringer Ingelheim France is maintaining its critical IT systems with intelligent notification workflow software from Derdack.

Boehringer Ingelheim France is part of one of the world’s top 20 pharmaceutical companies and its vision is value through innovation. Central to achieving this is maintaining critical IT systems, with a 99.9 per cent or greater uptime.

Until recently, Boehringer Ingelheim France had a large number of IT systems supporting its general business requirements and used a number of different software packages to monitor them. In the event of an IT fault, the monitoring systems generated and sent an alert to a member of the on-call support team. Although this system served its purpose, Boehringer Ingelheim France was faced with a number of limitations, particularly with alerts, which were of the one way ‘fire and forget’ nature meaning there was no visibility of what happened after the alert had been sent. If message delivery failed, no clear escalation path existed. Also, the system could not be integrated with the complex scheduling calendar.

Boehringer Ingelheim France initiated a project to review all of its monitoring systems and processes and after a thorough market review, selected Derdack’s message master Enterprise Alert system for its cost-effective intelligent notification workflow capabilities and multiple communication channels.

Now, message master Enterprise Alert, which is integrated with Microsoft Windows Server, acts as Boehringer’s centralised notification workflow hub. If there is a problem such as an IT hardware failure, the relevant monitoring system generates an alert and sends it to message master Enterprise Alert. The notification workflow hub then sends the alert to the relevant support member depending on available resources and according to their communication preferences. Typically, alerts are sent by SMS and the support member must acknowledge it has been received and acted upon. message master Enterprise Alert allows for acknowledgement via the same channel that delivered the alert – a key project requirement. If confirmation is not received within a set timeframe, the alert is progressed through an automated workflow. This can include trying alternative communication channels, such as a cell phone or fixed line call, and escalation to other team members or supervisors. The software also allows Boehringer to track alerts in real time and to analyse alerts to identify areas for improvement.

“message master Enterprise Alert gives us the ability to efficiently manage our alert notification workflow and minimise risk of business interruption,” says Boehringer’s system administrator and project leader Anthony Dumais. “We can easily change resource availability and the software follows a workflow to communicate with available support resources and escalate alerts as necessary until resolution has been achieved.”
With Derdack’s software embedded at the heart of Boehringer’s monitoring infrastructure, the company now has a more flexible system in place, which provides greater confidence that any IT problems will be swiftly resolved.

“We have seen a rapid ROI on this project,” Dumais concludes. “We are more proactive in how we deal with alerts. The system is critical to our ability to meet and exceed 99.9 per cent system uptime, and thus ensure business continuity. The support for multi-channel notification workflow, allied to the ease of use and deployment has validated our decision.”