NAPP Dumps Old System To overhaul Its SOP Management With NextDocs

NAPP Pharmaceutical Group, a leader in the field of pain control, had been using the same Documentum/QUMAS-based document management system since 2004 to manage and maintain its SOPs. Unfortunately, by 2010 the system was showing its age. It was painfully slow; its availability was unpredictable. It was expensive to maintain, did not integrate well with the company’s Microsoft-based infrastructure, and had proven to be less flexible than users and groups wanted. User frustration was so great that different teams within NAPP were quietly starting to rely on their own resources for SOP creation and management. At that point, NAPP decided it was time to replace the old system with a modern, enterprise-class system. They wanted a solution that would take advantage of the company’s investment in Microsoft SharePoint technologies and integrate well with the Microsoft Office tools that users already knew. They also wanted a solution that would deliver higher availability and performance. They met all these requirements with the NextDocs Document Management System.

In recent years, an annual survey of employee satisfaction of IT services at NAPP Pharmaceutical Group revealed a disconcerting consistency of opinion on one topic: the Documentum/QUMAS-based system that NAPP had been using to manage SOPs since 2004 was the most unpopular system in the company. Users found it inflexible and unreliable, slow to render documents, and slow to print. Even the IT department had reasons to dislike it: ongoing administration and support required the equivalent of a full-time employee, external support contract costs were onerously high, and the system simply did not integrate well with the Microsoft-based tools and infrastructure in use throughout NAPP.

“We knew we needed to address, this,” says Chris Clark, Head of Quality Compliance at NAPP. “The frustration level with the old system was very high. Users were starting to use systems of their own to manage SOPs, and that was not going to be good for compliance. We needed a single solution for the entire enterprise.”