MCR is a reporting system now being used by more than 170 medical representatives nationwide to retrieve their call plans and submit their call reports via mobile phones over GPRS while they are out in the field.
Tony Co, Roche national sales manager and MCR project manager, said, "Inefficient report submission, cumbersome reporting experience, delays in information flow, deployment woes, and high capital and maintenance costs are now things of the past."
Zenaida Bontigao, Roche IT manager, said, "We saw the business value of using cellphones over PDAs. The cellphone is ubiquitous, easy to use, and always by the side of the med rep."
She added: "Moreover, information, once sent via GPRS and received by our website, is automatically updated without the need for human intervention. MCR solves our connectivity problems, improves our reporting efficiency, and further opens communication lines with our entire field sales force."
According to Bontigao, deployment is a lot easier with MCR, which is conveniently downloaded over the air without the need of bringing in the phones from the field. Thus, the IT staff can attend to more pressing concerns at the office.
Medical representatives follow a quarterly plan that outlines the doctors they have to visit within the quarter. Previously, this call plan was paper-based. Now, the call plans are prepared on a Web-based system and are downloaded on mobile phones by the med reps.
As they go about their visits, they submit their call reports on the same phones over GPRS. Co said, "Filing a call report is now made extremely easy with menu-driven screens, predefined choices and drop-down pick lists. No need to deal with cumbersome and error-prone text messages."
Bontigao said, "MCR’s report tool is very useful since data are automatically saved in the database and viewable over the Web."
Once report data are received at Roche, they are processed and formatted for report presentation over a business intelligence Web portal – all this in an automated fashion, without the need for any human intervention.
Cliff Eala, president and CEO of Sequel Solutions, said, "We are delighted to be part of this project with Roche. As a result of their MCR and business intelligence implementation, they will surely benefit from an improved call reporting process, realize tremendous savings on both capex and communications costs, and will find over-the-air deployment a more efficient way of supporting the med reps in the field."
Sequel Solutions is an IT consulting and applications development services firm. It helps clients design and build enterprise solutions that leverage technology to enhance the value-creation capabilities of their businesses.
Sequel’s core service offerings include enterprise application integration, mobile and Web application development, business intelligence and data warehousing, and customizable interactive dashboards.