A leading Fortune 500 pharmaceutical company that specializes in discovering, developing, manufacturing and marketing prescriptions for humans and animals was looking for a more sophisticated incident reporting system. As one of the largest research-based pharmaceutical corporations, it is dedicated to improving quality of life while following the highest ethical standards and producing the most innovative, quality drugs. The company must track and report any emergency issue regarding health or safety ranging from toxic spills to security breaches. With offices worldwide, maintaining a centralized reporting system is a complicated task.
The pharmaceutical company needed an incident reporting system that would quickly distribute a reported health or safety issue or security breach to the proper personnel. With employees and offices all around the world, a secure, reliable system with optimal reporting performance is indispensable. The urgent nature of the occurrence of an incident requires immediate attention and does not allow for any margin of error. The company’s pre-existing method for reporting incidents — sending an email to the proper representatives — was subject to human error and delay. The pharmaceutical company hired VISTECH, a system integrator and independent provider of software and IT services, to develop an Incident Reporting System. As new needs arise, VISTECH continues to update and improve the program.
VISTECH employed CoDI Enterprise Suite, founded on Microsoft .NET, to build a web-based Incident Reporting System. CoDI is a set of tools which integrates scalable, reusable components with current systems. It utilizes a “wrap-not-scrap” philosophy by wrapping the renewed application with integration and translation services. By leveraging existing CoDI components, VISTECH can accelerate development while keeping costs low.
The Incident Reporting system allows any user to enter an issue. VISTECH adapted the associated non-registered user’s screens to make the application intuitive for infrequent or one-time users to navigate. The information entry page asks a user to categorize the issue by type and location, allowing the individual to select more than one for each. VISTECH added buttons beside each field to provide pop-up windows with more information and support for each step.
The system is written to provide proactive monitoring of all error handling. The Incident Reporting system constantly monitors the internet connection of all users. The system ensures that any information entered into the application is saved even if it is not submitted. For example, if a user loses his or her connection in the middle of entering an incident, the entered information will be saved in a cookie, thus appearing once the user logs on again. The same will occur if a user leaves the application idle for an extended period of time and the timeout functionality logs him or her off. The user also will be notified if, for any reason, the incident report does not go through.
VISTECH created the centralized system to automate the pre-existing process which was once primarily manual and subject to error. Because the Incident Reporting system is web-based, it is scalable and flexible to new needs that may arise. For example, the system currently calls on CoDI’s Messaging Component in order to distribute incident information by email. If the need arises, this same component can notify authorities by beeper.
VISTECH helped support and maintain the Incident Reporting system while it was being deployed in the production environment and continues to monitor the system to fulfill any new requirements.
In the past year, the latest Incident Reporting system has processed more than one incident per work day allowing the pharmaceutical company to process these incidents and distribute the information to the correct representatives without error or delay. By controlling the information flow so that incidents are received by only the correct personnel, the company is able to pass audits, and avoid fines or other penalties from regulatory agencies. By leveraging CoDI’s integration application components, VISTECH accelerated development of the Incident Reporting system by three to five times and reduced development costs.
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