Microsoft Announces 2007 Pharmaceutical and Life Sciences Innovation Award Winners

Awards honor companies creating breakthroughs in pharmaceutical and life sciences industries through use of Microsoft technology.

ATLANTA.— Microsoft Corp. today announced winners of the Microsoft Pharmaceutical and Life Sciences Innovation Awards 2007, honoring companies that have created new and innovative technology solutions to address critical issues affecting the pharmaceutical and life sciences industry.

The awards, announced at the Drug Information Association’s (DIA’s) 43rd Annual Meeting in Atlanta, were given to companies that have demonstrated the best use of Microsoft® technology-based solutions for making breakthroughs in business processes and practices in the areas of sales and marketing, manufacturing and supply chain, clinical development, and discovery and product innovation.

“Microsoft is committed to serving the pharmaceutical and life sciences industries with a platform that is reliable and easy to use, integrate and deploy,” said Steve Aylward, general manager of the U.S. Health and Life Sciences Group at Microsoft. “Each of these award winners is a terrific example of how our software can be leveraged globally in a way that not only simplifies and streamlines internal processes, but also improves the end-user experience, which is the ultimate goal.”

Award Winners

Award participants consisted of worldwide life sciences corporations specializing in biotechnology, diagnostics, medical equipment and devices, pharmaceuticals, animal health, nutritional products, and consumer health products. The winners are as follows:
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Sales and marketing category: H. Lundbeck AB, Helsingborg, Sweden. H. Lundbeck AB is a research-based company engaged in finding new drugs for treatment of central nervous system disorders, including depression, schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease.

H. Lundbeck AB’s solution uses the Brimstone CRM v06 solution for Life Sciences. Brimstone is a Microsoft strategic independent software vendor (ISV) for customer relationship management (CRM) that develops industry-ready multichannel CRM software based on Microsoft Dynamics™ CRM and Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007. H. Lundbeck AB’s solution is used collaboratively by the medical, marketing and sales staff to accomplish a wide variety of tasks, including segmenting and selecting customers and accounts for customer interaction, collecting customer contact footprints, analyzing information from customer interactions, and improving overall sales performance.

In the field, the solution provides the sales staff with a proactive sales tool for not only reporting, but also supporting and targeting sales efforts and improving productivity. The Brimstone solution enables sales staff to give and receive more structured feedback more quickly, leading to better performance, as well as a more efficient way to respond to customer demands.
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Manufacturing and supply chain category: PharmaZell GmbH, Rosenheimer, Germany. PharmaZell is a newly established company that has taken over Noveon Lubrizol’s business of delivering active pharmaceutical ingredients and intermediates. PharmaZell’s mission is to provide the highest-quality ingredients made under current good manufacturing practice (cGMP) at competitive prices.

PharmaZell implemented a Microsoft Dynamics NAV solution, an enterprise resource planning (ERP) product for small and medium-sized enterprises, with a Microsoft-certified vertical enhancement from TECTURA. After a management buyout from Noveon Lubrizol, the newly formed company had just six months to complete a prospective validated ERP implementation.

By implementing the Microsoft Dynamics and TECTURA solution, PharmaZell was able to fulfill needs in sales, purchasing, materials requirement planning, logistics, manufacturing, quality control, and lot management — while complying with pharmaceutical industry standards. In addition, the company has realized remarkably low failure rates with automation, running fast, controlled and consistent processes.
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Clinical development category: Pfizer Inc., Global Research and Development, New London, Conn. Pfizer is the world’s largest research-based pharmaceutical company, employing more than 115,000 people. Dedicated to enabling better health and greater access to healthcare for people and their animals, its purpose is to help people live longer, healthier and happier lives. The company also houses the industry’s largest pharmaceutical R&D organization: Pfizer Global Research and Development.

Pfizer implemented the Microsoft Office Enterprise Project Management (EPM) Solution to enable the identification and prioritization of drug candidate development projects that support strategic objectives, while aligning resources for optimal efficiency and productivity. Using this solution Pfizer was able to reduce multiple systems costs and push savings back into drug development. In 2007 Pfizer created an integrated enterprise solution that delivers reliable information on project status and plans, supporting decision-making on schedule, cost, resource and priority. The solution achieved this while remaining flexible and nimble enough to support individual global line of business requirements.
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Discovery and product innovation category: BASF Plant Science GmbH, Limburgerhof, Germany. BASF Plant Science is BASF’s plant biotechnology unit and a globally networked research company consisting of eight research organizations in five countries in Europe and North America.

Looking to optimize the world’s largest fully integrated life sciences knowledge base, BASF Plant Science implemented Microsoft Windows® 2003, SQL Server™ 2005 Enterprise Edition, metalife trinity, Visual Studio® 2003 and 2005, and the Microsoft .NET Framework. These solutions allowed the company to combine semantic data integration, text mining and knowledge generation to help researchers activate, compare and analyze data from sources across various areas. The enterprisewide aggregation of information and transformation into knowledge enabled BASF Plant Science to uniformly access and utilize all associated life sciences data. Metalife’s application, which can be easily enrolled on a large number of Windows clients, also drastically reduces administration expenses, by giving users easy-to-use and intuitive interfaces and complete control of tasks from database updates to user management.

The 2007 Pharmaceutical and Life Sciences Innovation Award winners were selected by an esteemed panel of industry experts:
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Matt Ferdock, chief executive officer, DataCeutics Inc.
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Scott Lundstrom, research vice president, Health Industry Insights, an IDC company
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Benjamin M.W. Rooks, vice president, William Blair & Co.
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Salvatore Salamone, senior contributing editor, Bio-IT World and Digital Healthcare & Productivity

More information about the winners will be highlighted on the Microsoft Life Sciences Web site at http://www.microsoft.com/lifesciences.