The Problem:
Schering-Plough Corporation, a large publicly traded pharmaceutical manufacturer of products such as Claritin and Coppertone needed to ensure that its 4000+ field sales personnel had a reliable, easy-to-use system that represented the life-blood of all field communications. The system had to work round-the-clock, 365 days a year. Field personnel needs were of utmost importance to Schering. The vision of Schering to implement applications that were far reaching depended on the reliability of the field communications system.

The Solution:
The challenge was to eliminate frustrations in the field and get out of the fire-fighting mode. To achieve near 100% success rates for field communications and to get critical and timely information to the users, processes and technology solutions were necessary for centralized control. A team of experts from ATC worked in conjunction with Schering’s IT group to define the requirements, design a complete mobile infrastructure utilizing new concepts and technologies and finally implement this system. The issues addressed included communications infrastructure, software distribution, data synchronization, file transfer, applications integration, statistical analysis of system logs, reporting, document distribution, systems management, support, and training.

The Results:
The success of this solution impacted more than just the users in the field. Schering was able to significantly reduce the overhead required to support and maintain the field systems, integrate and simplify the management of their many disconnected back-end systems, and operate in a proactive manner for problem resolution.