"The Critical Care organization doesn't have a portal - Reopean.com is our organization. Once an organization runs all major communication over a community portal, and once an organization stores all relevant knowledge on the communities - the portal becomes the organization".

Juergen Raths, Managing Director, Eli Lilly Critical Care Europe.

THE CLIENT

Eli Lilly and Company (NYSE: LLY) has been creating and delivering innovative medicines that enable people to live longer, healthier and more active lives since 1876. The company manufactures and distributes its products through owned or leased facilities in the United States, Puerto Rico, and 28 other countries and is sold in approximately 160 countries.

® ReoPro (abciximab, Centocor), is a cardiovascular drug provided by Eli Lilly that prevents blood platelets from clotting following certain heart procedures, such as angioplasty. ReoPro Europe has 110 employees across Europe and $100 million in annual revenue. Lilly began marketing Reopro in the 1990's and despite new competition, ReoPro solidified its best-in-class performance.

In 1999, the management of Eli Lilly Europe realized that in order to sustain their growth Lilly Europe needed to increase the speed and efficiency of knowledge flow within the organization, as well as with their clients, customers and partners. Especially for complex medicines like ReoPro, the main success factor in the market is the speed and accuracy of the knowledge transfer and the way the organization communicates and co-works with hospitals and partners.

Lilly Europe decided to set up a separate European business unit for ReoPro. The management began searching for a way to extend the benefits of e-collaboration and the internet to its customers and inside the organization in order to improve the capturing, distribution and creation of knowledge within their geographically distributed teams.

THE COLLABORATIVE WORKPLACE

Reopean.com gives Critical Care an environment in which their sales teams across Europe collaborate and share knowledge. This enables the organization to assemble the "best-fit" teams, efficiently applying resources for events and campaigns, regardless of the contributor's geographic location. The knowledge flow across this network enables the sales team to be updated continuously and also gives them instant access to any information required at any point of time. The constant interaction and discussion with co-employees, experts and partners has provided a speed that could never be realized with conventional modes of communication.

The Reopean Community Portal provides for each employee a personalized workplace, enabling the distribution of information to co-employees, suppliers, partners and selected customers via metalayer's XML/XSLT based Collaboration Platform. The cross-collaborative workspace has fostered trust among the various groups within the eXtended enterprise. People across Critical Care are now exchanging more of their knowledge, working together and evolving a new work culture of collaboration and co-learning, no matter where they are located geographically. The portal is powered by advanced collaborative features which are very intuitive and simple to use. With features like News, Discussion, Files, Virtual Meeting, Q&A, Questionnaires, Forms, Multimedia and other collaborative portal tools, Critical Care has also managed to save on processing costs, thus achieving efficiency, speed and cost effectiveness at the same time.

"In the next couple of months, we will expand reopean.com and mednetwork.org in all directions - we are moving more products and businesses on the platform, we are expanding the layers to our partners and supplier and we are building up strong networks with our customers on mednetwork.org. In a couple of months, global relationships within and outside the company will be managed on different layers."

Juergen Raths, Managing Director, Eli Lilly Critical Care Europe.