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Why P&G Took Its Own Path

Part of the reason P&G went its own way was that it needed a highly scalable system. The diversified consumer products company had revenue of $76 billion in the fiscal year that ended in June 2007, and invested more than $2 billion in R&D. The research organization has 27 technical centers and P&G is increasingly trying to include the efforts of external collaborators in its product development. So, software that might work well for a boutique biotech company wouldn't necessarily work well for P&G.

But the ELN project team didn't start out thinking in terms of PLM at all—and only indirectly found its way to Teamcenter as a technology platform that could be adapted to meet its needs.

Originally, about four years ago, P&G had started evaluating off-the-shelf electronic lab notebook software, with the goal of going paperless and improving the tracking of research data. But the ongoing cost would have been in the range of $2,100 to $2,400 per user per year - not necessarily out of the question for a high-yield segment like pharmaceuticals, but way too pricey for research into better soap suds. "For consumer products, that is a very expensive system," says project manager Caserta. (Once the transition away from paper notebooks is complete, the incremental licensing and support cost for the Teamcenter ELN system should be a few hundred dollars per year.)

That initial effort never got as far as a detailed system design. Once P&G's R&D leaders saw the potential price tag, all but two out of 25 dropped out of the ELN project. The vice presidents in charge of pharmaceuticals and feminine care products were still interested, and they asked Caserta to propose an alternative approach.

Caserta's solution was to capitalize on two software technologies that P&G had already corporate site licenses for - Teamcenter and Microsoft Office. P&G was already using Teamcenter to manage the design of product packaging and Office was its standard desktop productivity software.

With the additions of plug-ins such as ChemDraw from Cambridge Software for diagramming chemical structures and combinations, "we've got a perfectly good authoring tool in Microsoft Office," Caserta says. By basing the system on a general-purpose product, the note-taking system could be more generalized than an electronic lab notebook authoring tool designed specifically for pharmaceutical researchers. And because the scientists already knew Office, the training requirement would be minimal.

To make Microsoft Office like as an ELN authoring tool, the developers took advantage of an add-on module that forces Office to save open research documents automatically. For example, if a researcher enters data into an Excel spreadsheet, a time-stamped version of the document is saved every half-hour to help document what observations were recorded when. This provides a thorough audit trail that supports P&G's claim to any patentable discovery. If a researcher alters data, the old version of the document is retained—forcing researchers to explain their revisions and demonstrate that results have not been falsified.

"You have to give a reason for changing it, and you have to sign it again," Caserta says.

As for Teamcenter, which was created for product design collaboration, Caserta had found the software was adaptable to collaboration revolving around other complex data sets and processes. He had already applied it to one other project outside of the traditional PLM domain, a scientific discovery system for genetic engineering research where the system was used to track data related to gene targeting. That system had been expected to cost between $1.5 million and $2 million as a systems integration effort, but by using Teamcenter to simplify the project, Caserta's developers kept the cost down to about $450,000. The more he examined the electronic lab notebook project, the more he thought the same basic approach could be applied to P&G's ELN project.

UGS also saw a market opportunity and invested development resources in creating the ELN version of the product P&G is now using, which is marketed as Teamcenter Research Knowledge Management (RKM). The vendor paid the majority of the $3 million product development cost to create something that it could sell to other customers. "We did not pay zero, but it was pretty much a joint effort," Caserta says. Siemens continues to invest in the system, according to Dan Staresinic, worldwide director of consumer products and life sciences for Siemens PLM Software. Core features of Teamcenter RKM are proving interesting to R&D researchers in fields beyond biology and chemistry, he says, although he is not ready to name other customers.