PharmaPartners improves collaboration, gains insight

Headquartered in Oosterhout, the Netherlands, PharmaPartners B.V. offers integrated IT solutions for the primary-healthcare industry. With innovative IT concepts and more than 30 years of experience, the company helps healthcare providers and health centers communicate and collaborate. More than 800 pharmacies, 1,800 general practitioners and 50 healthcare organizations use the PharmaPartners eHealthServer solution, an information and communication infrastructure.

Responding to increasing product complexity and competition

PharmaPartners believes that healthcare quality, effectiveness and efficiency depend on companies’ ability to quickly access reliable and complete information. Therefore, the organization continuously seeks new ways to facilitate health-related information flows. Over the years, the company has grown significantly. Between 2000 and 2010, the number of PharmaPartners employees quadrupled. The organization’s development department currently consists of more than 50 professionals located in multiple sites spread out in numerous countries.

Because of increasing product diversification and complexity, along with a more demanding and competitive marketplace, PharmaPartners sought to streamline and improve its development process. In 2010, the company engaged an external consultant to perform a comprehensive assessment of its development environment. The consultant found five areas of improvement for PharmaPartners to target:
● Improving management of stakeholder expectations
● Enhancing predictability
● Increasing productivity
● Improving architecture processes
● Implementing more consistent procedures companywide

PharmaPartners began looking for a comprehensive software development solution that would help meet these goals.

Creating an integrated development environment

To address its goals, PharmaPartners worked with IBM Software Services for Rational® and IBM Premier Business Partner Synobsys Nederland B.V. to create an integrated development environment by implementing the following suite of IBM Rational software:
● IBM® Rational Team Concert™ software, which delivers a lean development and planning environment that the company can use to collaborate and monitor development activities
● IBM Rational Software Architect software, which supplies integrated design and development support for model-driven development with the Unified Modeling Language (UML), helping the company better align its software products with initial code requirements
● IBM Rational Requirements Composer software, which manages requirements and establishes traceability between requirements and test cases
● IBM Rational Quality Manager software, which provides a collaborative platform that employees can use to share information throughout the quality control process

PharmaPartners developers currently use Rational Team Concert software to support waterfall development, but the company plans to move to an agile development methodology in the near future. “Rational Team Concert software is very much geared toward the agile way of working, so we think the benefits will be even greater when we move to the agile method,” says Frank Laarakker, product manager, PharmaPartners.

The IBM team and Synobsys Nederland worked together to help PharmaPartners implement the Rational software. Once the implementation was complete, IBM Training provided the company with several educational workshops on the functionality of each Rational application. The IBM team also continued coaching PharmaPartners employees on the solution for three months after the implementation. Further, the organization collaborated with the IBM team to build a comprehensive roadmap for the future. PharmaPartners plans to expand the solution to include capabilities to support portfolio management, quality management and test execution.

Improving collaboration, gaining insight into development activities

Using the Rational software, PharmaPartners has seen an improvement in collaboration among its development teams, particularly with teams in Eastern Europe. In the past, teams used various open source applications for development support, which made collaboration difficult. By standardizing on the Rational applications, the company’s ability to collaborate in a multisite development environment greatly improved.

In addition, the Rational applications provide increased insight into development operations. “The dashboarding [in Rational Team Concert software] has been a great benefit to us,” says Laarakker. “Project managers use the standard widgets and burndown rates. It really gives a clear insight into where we’re standing at every single moment.” PharmaPartners has also seen an improvement in its ability to track work activities and plan development work. “We have insight into project statuses on a daily basis now,” says Laarakker. Project managers can use dashboards to access metrics on defect tracking and project risk management, and the information can be aggregated on a per-project basis. Finally, the company increased traceability. “There is an improvement in traceability between requirements and testing,” says Laarakker.

For more information

To learn more about IBM Rational software, please contact your IBM marketing representative or IBM Business Partner, or visit the following website: ibm.com/rational

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