Top Five Agricultural Company

Key points:

• A top agricultural company was looking for a better way to collaborate with its partners
• E-WorkBook Collaboration was identified as the ideal solution: ensuring efficient collaboration while still maintaining security and compliance
• Now data is finable and searchable when scientists need it

The company: An agricultural juggernaut  

The company is a top five agricultural technology organization with one critical mission: working to solve the global food crisis. It does this by mobilizing its global workforce and utilizing its end-to-end R&D capabilities to help growers overcome challenges managing weeds, insects, and other pests.

The challenge

Like many companies in the agricultural space, this company uses a Contract Research Organization (CRO) for some of their Chemical Development. In the past, they would ship paper notebooks from one hub to another. Similarly, paper notebooks were shipped back and forth between the company and its contract partners. This was very inefficient, time-consuming, and riddled with the possibility of error and data loss. It was very risky.

Ordering, shipping, and tracking notebooks is a logistical nightmare and an intellectual property (IP) risk.  Where are they? What’s in the notebooks?  How can our IP be protected? And unless each notebook is scanned there is no back-up.

In addition to the obvious logistical and IP challenges, the hidden cost and impact of secure physical storage and retrieval of paper notebooks can be large. Data in written form is difficult to search, verify, validate and check for accuracy. All of these factors slow down researchers and other interested parties, such as Legal; taking them away from more valuable activities.

The solution

After painstaking research into a solution to its problem, the company identified E-WorkBook Collaboration as the solution that would work best.

It would enable their CROs to enter the experiments and the structures in an electronic format and make the information available to transfer to their sponsor right away. In comparison to the costs of purchase, storage and transportation of paper notebooks, the costs of the licenses were good value.

The deployment

The IDBS Account team worked closely with the company and liaised directly with the development team to fully understand their requirements and define a solution that would meet their needs. They got into the details and asked the most pertinent questions: “How do you want the CRO to access the environment?” and, “What can they see/not see?”.

The team at the company were happy with the IDBS support and the R&D IT project manager further added,

“The company has implemented IDBS’ advanced E-WorkBook platform, which IDBS manages in a SaaS environment so that their CROs can access and update its data as needed.”

IDBS has ensured a built-in restricted access to company internal data. From a liability standpoint, it protects both the company and the CRO, as well as their IP.

Moreover, E-WorkBook has a built-in capacity for collaboration:

• Data security – the CRO can only see the information relevant to them
• Configurable – the CRO can see as much or as little as required

Company employees can access the data with their own single sign on (SSO) without the need for additional licensing for existing E-WorkBook Cloud users.

The results

With an electronic platform, the company and its partners can search by key words as well as chemical structures. A huge win! 

Data is now stored centrally, so there’s no need to search for them. The company can see the results in real time; whenever chemists want to see data, it is available – accessible even in their raw form.  

On top of that, the company can see how its CRO partner reached those results, the work behind it, who ran the protocols, what reagents were used, and so much more. The days of waiting for weekly or monthly feedback data are over.  

The benefits

Since implementing E-WorkBook, the company and its CRO partner have seen several improvements to their data management:

• Standardized user interface for both the company and its CROs
• Built-in ability to route for approval, either internally within the CRO or within the company
• No need to transfer experiments – they are always available
• Information is instantly searchable by Text and Chemical Structure
• Full access to raw data, experimental context, and interactions.