Pharmacia & Upjohn was a global pharmaceutical company formed by the merger of Sweden-based Pharmacia AB and the American company Upjohn in 1995. Today the remainder of the company is owned by Pfizer.

Chances are pretty good that if you open up your medicine cabinet, you might find one or more of Pharmacia & Upjohn, Inc., products on the shelf. The pharmaceutical giant is the maker of more than 140 different over-the-counter and prescription medicines such as Motrin, Cortaid, Kaopectate, Nicorette, Rogaine, Halcion, and Xanax, in addition to cancer treatment drugs, nutritional supplements, and a full line of animal health products.

Some of these products are made at Pharmacia & Upjohn's 5,000+-acre campus in Kalamazoo, Mich.—one of three Corporate operational headquarters, and the only one located in the United States. The other two operational headquarters (Pharma Product Centers) are in Stockholm, Sweden and Milan, Italy, with the Kalamazoo operation producing some 90 different products. Facility additions and expansions are always being made to the Kalamazoo campus as the company enlarges its product offerings and market share.

"It's a challenge for the architects," notes Doug Freeland, a Pharmacia & Upjohn Information Technology Specialist who is charged with managing the company's CADD drawings library. That library is made up of nearly 55,000 CADD drawings generated using MicroStation, Pharmacia & Upjohn's corporate standard graphic tool. The challenge of managing those files is made easy with tsaADVET's Falcon DMS Document Management System.

Since its introduction in 1989, Falcon DMS has saved thousands of CADD users time and significantly increased their productivity by providing a quick and easy way to access documents. tsaADVET's document management software is currently in use in hundreds of companies worldwide, representing a wide variety of industries—from food, beverage, utility, chemical, and multi-faceted manufacturing companies to government operations and pharmaceutical companies such as Pharmacia & Upjohn.

"Falcon is a good fit for us," says Freeland. "It allows us to keep track of all of our building drawings internally as well as those that go to architectural and engineering firms with whom we consult. The Location Checkout and Location Checkin features of Falcon make controlling any files sent off-site as easy and straightforward as those used in-house."

A Management Challenge

With actual production going on in about 70 buildings at the Kalamazoo campus, there's a lot to keep track of. The Pharmacia & Upjohn engineering operation is broken down into 14 separate disciplines, or units, explains Freeland. These units include civil engineering, mechanical engineering and electrical engineering, as well as office facilities management and instrumentation, and more. "Our engineering operation is not all that common," notes Freeland. "We have a decentralized drafting department, so there's no central drafting function." Instead, the 80+ CADD operators will work for any number of the 14 different disciplines.

A major on-going project at Pharmacia & Upjohn is maintaining current and accurate drawings reflecting the miles and miles of utility lines that run throughout its buildings and across campuses. Safety is of primary concern to the pharmaceutical giant, and government regulations mandate that manufacturers such as Pharmacia & Upjohn meet stringent safety requirements. "We're required by law to have the capability to identify what valve we would shut off if a pipe were to fail somewhere," explains Freeland. Falcon is vital to controlling and organizing this tracking process.

So why does Freeland like tsaADVET's document management system so well? "Falcon gives us the ability to have all of our drawings cataloged in a single, efficient library for immediate access," he says. Falcon, in fact, can extract and build a display library of about 1,000 records in about 5 to 7 seconds; smaller files are even faster.

One of the governmental regulations that Pharmacia & Upjohn must deal with involves process safety management. As such, the company must meet Food and Drug Administration regulations regarding how its drugs are made. Maintaining the flow charts, which represent the steps involved in the company's various drug-making processes and serve as part of the validation effort required by FDA regulations, is an ongoing process that Falcon helps manage.

And managing files is what Falcon is all about. The Document Manager user interface puts users in total control of all the files on their network. Users can move files, retrieve them, copy or rename them, add new files, determine file location, and search the database, very quickly and easily.

Ease of Use

Ease of use is one of the major reasons why Freeland and the CADD users at Pharmacia & Upjohn like Falcon so much. "The ability to go from one design file to the next design file inside of a MicroStation session is great for us," notes Freeland. When a CADD file is accessed for modification, Falcon automatically identifies and downloads all MicroStation reference files that are associated with the design file. At the System Administrator's option, downloading of reference files may be turned off, or the user may tag selected reference files for downloading.

Another reason why Freeland says Falcon is a good fit for Pharmacia & Upjohn is the compatibility of its file organization structures with the company's needs. Falcon allows a system manager to assign a database classification depending upon the unique file names in a company's overall document management environment. In Pharmacia & Upjohn's case, it is distinguished by a building-by-building breakdown that is further segmented into various individual units. "Falcon, with its flexibility and document organization features, allowed us to maintain our documents as we needed them. We didn't have to restructure to meet the document management system's requirements." notes Freeland.

In fact, when Freeland first learned about Falcon and its MicroStation-specific interface in 1992, he says, "I thought we died and went to heaven." Not surprising considering the Company had just spent the previous 18 months trying to make another drawing management product work in its environment. "It was not a well-written software product for our application," says Freeland of that product.

Stability & Performance

"Coming off this experience, we desired stability and performance," recalls Freeland. In addition, the Company was looking for an intuitive interface, an inexpensive solution, and a vendor who would stand behind its products. "tsaADVET delivered on all of these issues," affirms Freeland.

"Before that," he recalls, "we had an in-house written CADD system that we used for about 10 years." It was a very rudimentary system used to catalog drawings, and as Freeland puts it, had "pretty much gone as far as it could go."

"At that time, we had about 22,000 drawings," continues Freeland. "We've now increased that by 1-1/2 fold to about 55,000 drawings, all being managed by Falcon." Freeland feels that the ease with which this growth has been accomplished is a testament to the way end users feel about tsaADVET's document management product. "They feel Falcon is very intuitive, very easy to use," says Freeland. The Falcon Document Manager, which works internally within MicroStation and AutoCAD in addition to being Windows-based, is easy to learn and allows users to locate and select rapidly all documents regardless of file format. Once the document is selected, Falcon automatically launches the appropriate application, allowing the user to start work quickly and not waste time searching for files.

Pharmacia & Upjohn has a massive task on its hands—not only in the manufacturing of products in a highly competitive marketplace but also in managing its facilities growth to maintain state-of-the-art production facilities. Add to that the company's need to ensure that its processes are in compliance with Governmental regulations while operating in a safe environment, and it's clear that Pharmacia & Upjohn's reliance on its document management system is paramount. Falcon is an integral part of this management process by giving Pharmacia & Upjohn the document management tool it needs to manage and coordinate the demands of each part of its CADD operation.