Roche Pharmaceuticals chooses Infra
NewsFebruary 26, 2002
Automation gives Roche greater control over critical change management processes
EMC Infra has announced that Roche Pharmaceuticals Australia is using Infra's service management automation software to manage critical changes to its business and computer systems across the Asia-Pacific region. Infra has enabled Roche to achieve a higher turnaround of change requests, assisting the company in meeting stringent industry auditing requirements.
Infra has additionally provided Roche with the ability to track and audit changes, and maintain visibility of all changes in progress. This is particularly useful for managing changes occurring in dispersed locations across the Asia-Pacific region.
Legislation requires that all processes in Roche, such as the labeling of drugs and measuring of quantities of chemicals used to produce them, are 100% accurate. To ensure this, every component of every system used in the production of Roche's products, including all computer systems, must be fully tested, validated and documented.
Roche's systems validation is verified by both external audits and Roche's own internal audits across all areas of the business. According to Phil King, the Helpdesk Manager for Roche in Sydney, "The auditing requirements are getting tougher every year. As technology enables more thorough auditing, so the expectations have risen".
As a result, Roche maintains an extremely rigorous IT change management process. Once a system or component, including hardware, software, documentation, security and personnel is defined as a Configuration item, changes can only be performed under a formal Change Control process.
Prior to implementing Infra to manage its change requests, Roche had been using two separate databases for IT incident and problem management, and change management. Infra was being used for the former, while change management data was held in MS Access and required a number of manual processes and "a lot of email".
The manual process, says King could be time consuming, generated volumes of paper and had the potential to miss steps. There was also no function to escalate change requests, which could lead to changes becoming stalled at particular tasks.
"It would be very difficult to pass an audit these days with the manual system.
"Now with Infra, paperwork is practically eliminated, and both the people working on a change, and managers requiring an overview can easily see where any change request is up to.
Since the initial implementation, King's team has streamlined and reduced the number of change requests managed through Infra, reflecting a steady improvement in the processes themselves. They currently maintain around eight separate process templates for change: five for the SAP team and one each for the network, Unix and storage management teams.
The use of a single integrated system additionally enables Roche to effortlessly manage the service support lifecycle of incidents, problems and changes, and maintain a single Configuration Management database.
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