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Collaborative Case Study: A New CIOZone Feature.
Read the case and post your questions and observations in the comment box at the end of the story. P&G project manager Keith Caserta will be logging in to respond to all the comments that he can.

By David F. Carr

Proctor & Gamble hopes to reinvent the process of invention within the company with an Electronic Lab Notebook system that went live within its research & development organization at the end of February.

Although online data tracking for researchers is not new, particularly within some specialties such as pharmaceuticals, P&G's challenge was to devise a system that encompasses the diversity of its research, which includes some drug development but also efforts to find a sudsier soap or a more absorbent diaper. The company's R&D groups employ more than 8,000 people, more than half of whom are targeted as potential Electronic Lab Notebook (ELN) users.

In serious R&D organizations, notebook keeping is a critical discipline. Researchers are expected to maintain precise, signed, witnessed, and time-stamped records of what experiments were conducted when, and what results were recorded. By documenting where it is breaking new ground, a product development organization strengthens claims to any patents it may file for a chemical compound or other invention. Most P&G researchers still handle this process with three-ring binders. So even when the data starts out electronic—for example, as a graph generated directly from the output of a lab instrument—the results are typically printed, hand-signed, and stuffed in a binder. So streamlining this process and putting it online should pay big dividends.

For instance, moving from paper to a Web-based ELN system opens up new possibilities for international collaboration within P&G. In fact, one R&D team focused on household products is looking at the possibility of creating a common notebook that would be shared with its counterparts in China. "That's not something we would have even attempted without this," says Steve Sealschott, one of P&G's researchers.

But there's shortcomings with typical ELN products, which includes the lack of a highly scalable systems architecture and relatively basic workflow management, says project manager Keith Caserta, a Ph.D. chemist turned information technologist.

Caserta attempted to avoid those problems by starting with the back end and creating a common data archiving system that can be fed by a variety of lab authoring tools for different disciplines.

What P&G created was a hybrid system based on the Teamcenter product lifecycle management (PLM) system—a single set of software capable of managing every aspect of a product's development—from software vendor UGS rather than choosing a package developed specifically for ELN management. (UGS was acquired by Siemens last year, so Teamcenter is now a product of Siemens PLM Software.)

By choosing to partner with Teamcenter's developers to create a new ELN system based on PLM software, rather than buying an established ELN product from a vendor such as Contur or Labtronics, P&G essentially endorsed the idea that PLM software has strengths that extend beyond the world of mechanical and electrical engineering where it originated.

But by going in its own direction, P&G did run into a few hurdles. Development has taken longer than anticipated and the team had to overcome the challenges of using electronic signatures in a research environment. Yet the P&G team prevailed and is rolling out one of the largest ELN deployments to date.

And the project has caught the attention of IT experts.

Michael H. Elliott, CEO of Atrium Research, a research information technology analyst firm, says P&G took a novel approach. "A lot of the other electronic lab notebooks have very good tools for a specific discipline such as medicinal chemistry, so they have advantages for the end user scientist, but they often don't have very good back-end technology."