The key goal of the project is to streamline the management of regulated documents across the entire life cycle and to meet strict, constantly changing legal requirements in many different parts of the world concurrently. B. Braun also expects to benefit from more effective exchange of information through collaboration as well as efficient and controlled access to all process-related company documents.

"B. Braun is in a heavily regulated industry. As such, process efficiency and compliance are among our top business priorities from an IT perspective," said Steffen Epple, Director of the IT Competence Center PLM at B. Braun Melsungen AG. "Our value-added processes rely on the exchange of documents and knowledge. In order to become more efficient and effective, we needed to set up a company-wide, uniform, integrated infrastructure for content management."

Like many life sciences firms, B. Braun is subject to a host of requirements from the U.S. Food & Drug Administration and the European Union to obtain approvals for new medical devices. Numerous documents and employees from all over the world are involved in the process of bringing products to market. Being able to orchestrate people, processes and content efficiently is critical to the company's success.

"We have closely followed the maturation of the Open Text offering over the last few years and have been extremely impressed," Epple said. "None of the other vendors we evaluated were able to offer a platform with comparable integration depth or as broad a functional scope. Open Text also brings a level of expertise and knowledge of our industry that will help ensure the success of this project."

Global Document Repository to Eliminate Content Silos

B. Braun is currently using a document management system from Open Text that supports around 2,000 users in the area of regulated documents. The company's remaining document inventory is distributed among various databases, file servers or e-mail systems, and must be managed manually by users. Data redundancies and inconsistencies across these silos, as well as performance problems make it impossible to perform company-wide search queries.

Taking advantage of Open Text technology, such as Enterprise Library Services, B. Braun will create a central repository for all process-related company documents worldwide. This will be integrated with the Open Text archive for the SAP systems already in place and documents from other systems will also be migrated into the repository as part of the project. Additional solutions from the Open Text ECM Suite will be implemented so that the integrated services for archiving, records management, search and collaboration will be available worldwide.

The first phase of the project, which began in October, is dedicated to managing regulated documents for users in Germany, Malaysia, Spain and the U.S. The main deployment is scheduled for mid-2009 and will enable users to manage both regulated and non-regulated business documents across their entire life cycle, exchange information through forums, blogs and communities, and collaborate on projects in a more structured way. The worldwide roll-out to all users is expected to be completed by the end of 2011.

Open Text ECM Suite
The Open Text ECM Suite brings together the content management capabilities needed to manage all types of enterprise content, including business documents, vital records, Web content, digital assets (images, audio, video), email, forms, reports and more. The Open Text ECM Suite gives customers a way to move at their own pace and evolve their ECM solutions from the departmental level towards an integrated enterprise-wide ECM strategy. Open Text's ECM Suite offers the cross-enterprise ECM solutions customers need as the strategic importance of ECM grows in large organizations, driven by compliance and the need to cut costs. For more information, go to: http://www.opentext.com/2/global/sol-products/sol-pro-open-text-ecm-suite.htm

About B. Braun Melsungen
As a worldwide medical equipment and services supplier, B. Braun provides products in the fields of anesthesiology, internal medicine, cardiology, extracorporeal blood treatment and surgery as well as services for hospitals, medical practices and the homecare industry. The daily interaction between the B. Braun products constantly results in new findings that go into product development. With its innovative products and services worldwide, the company helps to optimize workflows at hospitals and medical practices and improve safety, both for patients as well as for doctors and healthcare providers. For the 2007 fiscal year, B. Braun recorded earnings of more than 3.5 billion euro and employs 35,000 employees worldwide.

About Open Text
Open Text, an enterprise software company and leader in enterprise content management, helps organizations manage and gain the true value of their business content. Open Text brings two decades of expertise supporting 50 million users in 114 countries. Working with our customers and partners, we bring together leading Content Experts(TM) to help organizations capture and preserve corporate memory, increase brand equity, automate processes, mitigate risk, manage compliance and improve competitiveness. For more information, visit www.opentext.com.

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