Case Study – Locus Pharmaceuticals

Case Study – Locus Pharmaceuticals

Company Background

Locus Pharmaceuticals is a privately held pharmaceutical company focused on developing novel, small molecule therapeutic drugs. Since the Locus technology generates novel molecules, an equally important outcome is the realization of valuable intellectual property.

Ms. Patricia Oponski of Locus’s Legal Affairs Department handles much of the research needed by the company, in fields such as business intelligence on the company’s competitors, scientific areas of interest, and IP. There are also a number of scientists who do research for their own needs.

The Problems:

1. Important information was dispersed throughout the company
Ms. Oponski needed to collect all the company’s research by subject and make it available to different employees. Before adopting Net Snippets, she did this by putting information in a public folder in the company’s email program. Saved documents, such as PDFs were placed on a public drive on the server. Nonetheless, material was scattered: “We had a lot of documents that were all over the place,” Ms. Oponski explained. “Nobody knew where documents were located.” The company needed a single repository that could be accessed by any authorized person.

2. Time and money wasted in “reinventing the wheel”
Since information was scattered, co-workers sometimes ordered articles that somebody else had already purchased, not realizing that the company already owned them, or re-researched subjects for which the needed information was already available.

3. Material in different formats could not be handled together
Ms. Oponski regularly needed to file together many different types of documents, including: information and article abstracts from websites, articles from electronic publishers, and messages from e-mail and forums. It was difficult to do this using the tools she had available.

4. Collaboration difficulties
Locus Pharmaceuticals needed an easy way for its employees to access all relevant material, no matter who had found it.

The Solution: Net Snippets

Ms. Oponski tried out Net Snippets and decided that it would solve the company’s information-organization problems. She especially liked Net Snippets’ ability to place a large amount of information in different formats into a central location. So, since the main need was for a central repository accessible by many employees, she opted for the Enterprise Edition.

The Results

1. Easy document-saving

Ms. Oponski no longer needs to save articles and other documents separately from the web and text excerpts. Everything – abstracts, articles and whole documents, including PDFs – goes into the relevant Net Snippets folder.
Net Snippets’ screen-capture function enables her to save whole screens and preserve the look of the original document.
Another great help is the ability to transfer material already on her computer, such as data from email messages, to the Net Snippets repository, and merge or interfile it with material found during a search.

2. Easy editing of saved information

The ability to highlight, bold-face and rearrange the text of information snippets, says Ms. Oponski, is “very beneficial.”
She also appreciates the ability to append material from different documents to a previously-saved snippet, thus collocating together snippets of information from various sources.
It’s a great help that she can now add metadata – especially keywords – to saved material.
She doesn’t need the ability to add comments so much, but can see that for many companies this would also be a great help.

3. Improved organization of the information

It’s so easy to save items of information in hierarchical folders, and to move them between folders if the information needs to be re-organized.

4. Time and money saved

Net Snippets’ search feature makes it easy to find material that’s already in the company’s repository. Ms. Oponski would like the search feature to be improved even more, since it saves the company a good deal of money and effort that was previously wasted in acquiring information or buying documents which the company already owned.

5. Easy collaboration and dissemination of information

For security reasons, only Ms. Oponski is authorized to upload to the server and to edit or delete material on it. Other employees send her material to upload. All authorized employees can read and print material from the repository.
After new material has been uploaded, the relevant employees are sent email messages with a link to the added information. Snippets containing information that for copyright reasons cannot be placed on the server, can be sent to individuals by email.
Apart from the advantages of having everything filed together, Locus Pharmaceuticals finds that the central repository is the easiest way for them to share information among their employees.