Identifying and eliminating time drains: Biotech pioneer Biogen streamlines processes with Power Platform

The challenge: Plenty of optimization potential, little capacity 

A Biogen employee answers the phone to a customer. The caller is ringing on behalf of a hospital: she’s urgently looking for information about a new drug. But the employee isn’t responsible for this treatment area, and by the time she finds the right field force representative, valuable time has been lost—all because the relevant information is not stored in a central location.

Biogen prides itself on putting the customer first but, as in any company, the employees in the specialist departments are all too familiar with process gaps that make their work more difficult. Minor setbacks quickly mount up to major difficulties. “It could be that contact information is missing, or key data is buried deep in an inbox instead of being processed,” says Hajo Ramsauer, Head of IT at Biogen GmbH in Munich. “These kinds of process gaps disrupt collaboration—both internally and with external partners and customers. Small hurdles, which differ from one department to another, take time to remedy. This is something we want to avoid.” Ramsauer had a clear goal in mind: improve and speed up any processes that take too much manual effort and are overly susceptible to errors. The departments were closely involved in identifying these processes—after all, they know their workflows best. But the idea wasn’t to create a big project for each individual process—that would have taken too much time, effort, and expense. Instead, Biogen went in search of a highly scalable and central platform that the departments could use to develop their own solutions to match their specific needs. To pull this off, the company enlisted the support of Arineo, a member of the Microsoft Partner Network. The two companies quickly identified Microsoft Power Platform as the tool of choice.

The solution: Tools for field force representatives, employee onboarding, and coaching—Power Platform provides the basis for practical applications

Employees should be able to make their work processes quicker and more efficient, or even automate them, without having to rely on outside assistance. Power Platform provided the framework and the departments the knowledge base for Biogen and Arineo to develop applications in Power Apps. “Our close collaboration with the specialist departments was the crucial factor in implementing the projects,” says Harald Tingelhoff, Director Business Development at Arineo GmbH. “Right from the start, they pinpointed where there was room for improvement. It wasn’t long before the first new solutions were ready.” Arineo provides invaluable assistance, especially when it comes to programming and managing all the smart applications. 

Employees can now quickly look up who’s responsible for what treatment area thanks to the Field Force Finder app developed by the sales department. “It’s intuitive and complements the functions of the CRM system,” Tingelhoff says. “The app immediately tells Biogen employees which of their field force representatives are responsible for what treatment areas.” Field Force Finder is based on Power Apps and SharePoint. It’s also closely tied to Microsoft Teams, the central communication platform at Biogen. 

Biogen’s IT department has now also got its own app. “A Power App has provided us with a structured means of passing important information between future employees, Human Resources, and IT,” Ramsauer says. From signing a contract to the first day of work, an onboarding platform automated by Power Automate makes sure new employees are fully set up from a technical perspective. “The platform knows whether the employee will be working in the office or from home. It knows what access is yet to be requested and sends out corresponding automatic emails,” Ramsauer says. “This ensures that new employees at Biogen are up and running from day one. And it lightens the load for HR and IT. Gone are the days of ‘I still need this, that, and the other’.” The success of Biogen’s onboarding platform has already transcended national borders: before being implemented in Germany, it was already being used in Switzerland. A global rollout is in the pipeline.

Another complex project involves a coaching app for field staff development, which is already in the works. “Besides storing data and making it available, the app also processes competency models and adapts them to each individual employee,” Ramsauer says. “The appeal of Power Platform in this project lay in its flexibility to realize the vision of the sales managers at Biogen’s German branch using an existing tool.”

Working together with Arineo, Biogen has provided each of its departments with a versatile tool that can be used to solve simple as well as complex problems. With internal processes throwing up fewer stumbling blocks, the company’s employees can focus on what’s really important: providing patients with innovative drugs to combat serious illnesses.