Leading Icelandic generic pharmaceuticals company Pharmaco hf grew out of its shoes. Following a five-year series of strategic mergers and acquisitions, its market presence augmented to nine production factories, four product development facilities and 25 representative offices across five continents. As a result, the corporation operated under six different brands and only the consecrated were aware of their belonging to a single corporation. Strategizing further, the company decided to launch a massive $2 million campaign aimed at finding a common Corporate Brand Identity. It comprised a new brand name, signage, product packaging and a common Web corporate representation, which would integrate all corporate belongings into a common web network and would raise investor and customer awareness in available product and facility range. This was the necessary strategic move that would befit an organization with the ambition to be a generics pharmaceuticals leader on a global scale. On May 17, 2004, the company officially changed its name to Actavis Group hf. The same day Web portal www.actavis.com was launched.

Situation
 
The series of strategic acquisitions and solid investment in product development put Actavis Group hf. to a solid competitive position. Now its market capitalization hovered around the $1.3 billion mark and allowed it move part of its share trading to the London Stock Exchange. It augmented its representation to 25 countries. Yet the six brands, although each recognized internationally, had little connecting it to the new owner. Former owner companies had their websites, but each promoted a trademark, not a corporate brand. Each decided the graphic outlook, navigation, content, technological platform on their own. So the companies had their distinctive, but divergent look. They lacked the cohesive image that customers, prospects, investors could attribute to a product range and facilities of a single owner.

Discrepancies extended to individual selection of hosting service providers and, consequently, each company needed to buy hardware and software, pay for hosting services on an individual basis. In this way, Actavis owners noticed a wide fluctuation in expenses depending on regionally-dependent hosting tariffs and hardware and software costs.

Besides, the majority of existing Web sites were static. The need to continually upload HTML-written pages translated into a big staff of writers and HTML-cognizant assistants for each single update to a website. The publication procedure was cumbersome and often writers felt demotivated to do frequent additions to the Web site.

Ognyan Drenski, Actavis Bulgaria IT Director, said, “We felt we needed a common corporate identity to instill a feeling of corporate belonging within our globally-deployed staff and raise customer and investor awareness in who we are, what we do and where we do it. And this we wanted to transpire in a converging presence on the web. We also wanted it to be integrated and, if possible, centralized to make maintenance and hosting fees predictable over the long term. We wanted it to be user-friendly to facilitate our non-technically oriented writers and editors upload information easily.”

Solution

Indeed, with its new Web presence Actavis Group hf wanted three targets hit – new corporate brand promotion that would integrate brands under a common identity, cut on hardware and maintenance costs and build it after the latest fad and technology to make it user-friendly for non-technical writing staff.

This has been the assignment, with which representatives of Actavis Group hf approached leading Microsoft Certified Partner BSH (Bulgarian Software House) Ltd. After due consultations with IT specialists from Balkanpharma, Bulgarian-based subsidiary of Actavis, BSH team decided to build a Corporate Web Portal and then create regional sites for each country, where the conglomerate had a production, product development facility or representative office. Each regional site would replicate the graphic outlook – logo and color palette – navigation and style in content writing. They would also share a common URL, the only difference being the country-specific extension. The navigation would ensure that corporate and regional sites were interconnected at all tiers of the Web site. Site-pervasive search and indexing options ensured yet another easy means to find what one needed no matter which page the entry was made.

BSH Ltd. offered to station the Web sites on Microsoft Content Management Server to ensure the dynamic and easy upload of information from the administrative pages of the site. This would allow writers concentrate on their main, content creation task. With Microsoft CMS, now writers with basic technical skills can upload textual, visual, audio files in less than a minute. As a result, the content management staff could enjoy savings in time, which allowed for a restructuring that was impossible without increasing staff numbers. Now previously employed HTML programmers ceded place to editors and ensured a new quality assured work process. Those minutes committed previously to routine HTML-page creation now went for editing and coalescing texts into a corporate-adopted style.

Further, the company headquarters decided to centralize the entire maintenance of the web network in London to cut on hosting fees and hardware investments, as well as make them predictable over the long run. To ensure the smooth operations of all embedded functionality, the solution infrastructure was deployed on two HP single processor servers running MS Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition operating system, Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Standard Edition, Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server 2003, Microsoft Content Management Server 2002 Enterprise Edition SP 1a and Microsoft Internet Information Services 6.0.

Within 40 days or by May 17, 2004, the official launch of the new Brand Name, BSH Ltd. published the main corporate website along with the sites in Iceland, Bulgaria and Malta.

Benefits

Brand Awareness
Encapturing the entire scope of information related to products, existing product development, investor information, regionally-specific information now has found the orderly manner Actavis needed. Published information on the Web now contained all necessary attributions about past, traditionally known trademarks to its present and future belonging to the common Actavis brand. The clickable logo, invariably present on each page of the Web network, ensures uninterrupted visibility of the corporate message. Graphics, content and navigation ushered the online brand promotion campaign to success.

Surveys of Actavis’ corporate information office showed timefold increase in visitor numbers compared to the compound visitor numbers of the formerly existing subsidiary Web sites.

Segmented, Easily Entered and Found Information
Now the information is structured in an orderly fashion so that it fits four basic target audiences – customer/prospect, healthcare professionals, media and investors (placed in a section of the corporate website).

With the help of Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server and a BSH-programmed module based on Microsoft Content Management Server, each client may find a catalog with all products offered by a regional office along with a clear, accurate and complete description of each product. The customized place holders visible only from the administrative pages of a regional Web site allow each medication be described in a standard fashion, following a shared corporatewide sequence of entries such as: Trade Name, Generic Name, Composition, Description, Marketing and Product Image, SPC Document. The searching and indexing options further allow filtering products by name, composition, therapeutic purpose, first letter, group and type – humane or for veterinary purposes.

Since distribution and sales of medication is a highly sensitive issue and these activities are under strict legal regulation, all licensed healthcare professionals and distributors working with the products of Actavis are listed by name and telephone number. In this way, by a couple of clicks on the regional website a sales agent can double-check the credibility of each partner wholesaler or healthcare professional or establish a contact with a referred professional.
Representatives from the media may inform real-time about the latest news about the company and search for accurate and objective historical data about the company and its associations by simple ordering of a press kit.

Investors may find fresh statistics and information on Actavis’ stock fluctuation on the London Stock Exchange, read the corporate annual reports to ensure full disclosure of corporate dealings of importance to brokers, stakeholders, prospective investors.

Ease of Use and Publication
“Why should a man waste time doing what a machine can do,” said Assen Kirilov, IT Specialist at BSH Ltd. Microsoft Content Management Server allows the creation and publication of a web page in a several-step procedure that presupposes no technical expertise, even HTML programming. Placing the prepared document in a text box or a picture box widely increases the number of people capable to operate with content on the site and allows people to use the time – otherwise previously used for programming the page – for editing and perfecting the content.

Further, each new product entry and, respectively, corrections made, is automatically replicated in the respective identical product category in the corporate website. The Internet traffic, depending on Internet traffic is between one to five hours. In this way, the corporate website - www.actavis.com - becomes Actavis’ database for the entire product range.

Optimum, Predictable Costs, Maximum Security
The placement of all websites on a single technological platform has reduced costs for hardware. Additionally, Actavis Web maintenance technical staff radically shrunk in numbers as a result of the new centralized solution. Their sole dedication to the maintenance of the entire Web portal network enhanced their expertise in this field and ensured the provision of prompt and unfaltering Web services. Coupling it with reliance on a single, tested hosting service provider ensured that all Web sites are online 24/7 from each point of the world.

Centralization of the latter services into a single place allowed for economies of scale and predictability of expenses:

• By offsetting the need to employ maintenance officials for each single website
• By cutting an entire HTML-programming staff and redirecting them to more complicated, technologically advanced projects
• By getting a discount from host for entrusting the entire web network to its services
• By buying a single hardware set, instead of a multiple, as it used to be in the past.