You find the title daring? Convince yourself that these are not only sales and marketing numbers!

Your platform – OpenText D2 Documentum for Life Sciences

With Documentum for Life Sciences, OpenText has a solution in its portfolio that is used by many large and medium-sized customers. The pre-defined, best practice-based framework for document management applications offers in four modules (Quality & Manufacturing, Research & Development, Electronic Trial Master File and Submission Store & View) pre-configured options for an exact configuration. This gives you the opportunity to remain close to the standard and at the same time to display directly all your processes.

If you are already a D2 customer or even a customer of OpenText Documentum for Life Sciences (formerly named as Life Science Solution Suite), you will know the situation well: In various workshops with the business, the requirements were clearly defined at the beginning of the project and then implemented afterwards in configurations. Maybe you already have applied patches? Or you are facing this challenge in the near future? I can already reveal at this point: An effort of 40 person days is not uncommon.

The challenge of applying patches and updates

You may be wondering if you are the only one who sees this as a real challenge.  I can clearly say from experience: We are facing the challenge of applying patches and updates at many customers.

I’d be happy to give you an insight:

For example, we are currently introducing the »Quality & Manufacturing« and »Research & Development« modules for a Top 30 Life Science customer. Last year in the current implementation project, it was also necessary to install the latest patch. The customer has made a large number of configurations in the existing system to this day. This finally presented us with the challenge that the effort for the configuration adjustments to the new patch in the project would have been considerably higher than previously assumed.

The right tool for patches and updates

So, how do you meet the challenge of new patches and updates? I would like to show you the solution we have found for our customer mentioned above:

The main challenge here was with the new patch version, the configuration options also changed. Specifically, this meant that the status fields or names might change within D2 rules. This of course has an influence on the application. The customer would have had to check all changed fields and, in the worst case, manually go through each individual configuration.

If you also have one or more modules of OpenText Documentum for Life Sciences in use, you will be familiar with their processes and know how many places and screws you may have worked on. Our customer had 1,800 set screws that had to be checked.

In the current project, we discussed the situation together with the customer. Because: Due to the multitude of configuration possibilities, there was the danger that the effort would inevitably be very high. Therefore, we decided to develop a tool that enabled us to automate a large part of the work and thus significantly reduce the project duration. In this way, patches and updates of the D2 applications can be applied much faster and easier and, at the same time, the existing rule changes could be adopted by semi-automatic means.

Now back to our 60 % to 90 % from the beginning…

How fme D2 Merging Services can save you 60% to 90% of your time for patches and updates

Our customer had 1,800 configuration elements. In the first step, the fme merging expert quickly succeeded in automatically checking and merging 1,200 configuration elements. Has the new element changed compared to the previous version? No? Then it will be maintained.

The monotonous comparison of the individual configuration elements carries a high risk of errors. This risk is minimized by the help of our experts and thus directly counteracts possible errors.

At the same time, the positive effect of direct savings becomes apparent: If we assume that two minutes were previously required per configuration element for the check, then five man-days can be saved here alone!

What happened to the other 600 elements in our example? These were examined for various attributes so that a sound decision could then be made on how to proceed with them. The experts involved were specially trained and worked with the semi-automatic rule changes already mentioned, and also reduced the time required here.

Finally, in a small part of the elements a manual check was necessary. Wouldn’t 100% automation have been possible here? The answer is no, because there are simply decisions that cannot be made automatically. Nevertheless, we were able to keep the effort on the customer side between 60 % and 90 % lower than would have been necessary in comparison to a completely manual merging.

Meeting the challenge with expert support

Our fme Merging experts have the experience to prepare you for the challenges of applying patches or updates and to eliminate wrong decisions.

An important point here is the already mentioned reduction of the error rate: Due to manual processing of the configuration elements there is a significantly higher risk than through the used half mechanisms, as they are applied by our experts.

The traceability and reproducibility also guarantees compliance with validation guidelines to a much greater extent than manual procedures can.

In this way, our experts support you in making faster and more efficient progress with patches and updates. A big advantage is that on the one hand they are trained in the tool and on the other hand they have many years of Documentum and life science know-how.

This way you are well prepared for any upcoming challenge!

And now? When will I see you?

Are you planning to install one or even several patches in the near future? Or have you just finished patches and updates, but want to be prepared for the future? Let’s talk!

As a first step, we will discuss together how we can best support you in your project – may I invite you to a coffee? In a second step, our merging experts gain an impression of the complexity of your environment in order to estimate what effort is actually required.

We look forward to your contact request and to getting to know you personally!