How Procter and Gamble Moved to Electronic Documents

The Business Problem P&G faced problems managing the vast amounts of paper required for a troupe that develops drugs and over-the-counter (OTC) medications. Regulatory issues, research and development (R&D), and potential litigation induce even more paper text files and files. As a result, P&G wanted to gain control of its company documents, reduce administrative precaution of its paper documents, reduce costs, accelerate R&D initiatives, and improve bring in and undertakeature compliance. P&G decided to adopt an electronic document management system.When P&G moved to electronic documents, it had to ensure that it could manifest digital signatures and build signing and storage processes into its daily workflow. Further, P&Gs legal department wanted to ensure that it had a lawfully enforceable signature on file. The IT Solution P&G dark to IT integrator Cardinal Solutions (www. cardinalsolutions. com) to implement Adobe LiveCycle Reader Extensions and Adobe LiveCycle PDF root (www. adobe. com), which would function with P&Gs eLab Notebook program.These software packages would manage, review, approve, and sign the huge volume of R&D information, including files created with Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. P&G adopt the pharmaceutical industrys Signatures and Authentication for Everyone (SAFE) BioPharma Association standard. This standard was accomplished to help companies go paperless and still interact with regulatory authorities on a global scale. P&Gs initiative rivet on implementing methods to manage digital signatures and creating a method to confirm the individuation of the signer.The companys IT and legal departments agreed that the standard met the companys business needs and risk requirements. Instead of recording information from experiments in paper notebooks along with numbering each page, signing it and having a assure sign it researchers give the bounce now use word processing programs, spreadsheets, first appearance softwar e, and similar tools to generate project notes and other necessary documentation. After a researcher has collected all the data, LiveCycle PDG Generator creates a PDF document and prompts the individual creating the file to add a digital signature.The system requires the use of a USB token for authentication. At that point, LiveCycle Reader Extensions embeds usage rights within the document. The Result Today, at once a digital signature is added to a file, an auditor can flat view the document and all activity related to the document. The auditor right-clicks on the signature and views the entire audit trail. The signature can also be appended as a last page of the file so that it can be shared externally when necessary, such as in a court of law.The system saves P&G quantify and money. Researchers no eternal have to spend several hours per week archiving paper files from their experiments. In addition, P&G is able to quickly retrieve large volumes of data that whitethorn be ne eded for government regulators or business partners. P&G projects that it will achieve tens of millions of dollars in productivity gains by using the system. The natural employee will save approximately 30 minutes of signing and archiving time per week..