Quintiles improves global collaboration with Office 365

By Rebecca Gibson on 24 March 2016

Quintiles improves global collaboration with Office 365

Global biopharmaceutical services company Quintiles has enhanced global collaboration, mobility and productivity after partnering with Perficient to replace its aging e-mail infrastructure with the Microsoft Office 365 suite.

The company, which operates in 100 countries and has offices in 60, conducts hundreds of clinical studies worldwide to help transform clinical development, improve patient outcomes and maximise commercial value. It also helps life sciences companies produce successful clinical therapies and medications by executing clinical trials, providing advisory services, patient engagement and lab support. A third of its workforce is mobile.

Faced by an aging e-mail infrastructure and collaboration difficulties, Quintiles engaged with Microsoft National Solution Provider Perficient, a cloud expert, to begin its transition to Office 365 in January 2014.

“Quintiles is growing quickly, and until recently, we had trouble with our collaboration services keeping pace with our rapid growth and giving employees what they needed to work effectively as part of a global team,” said Sharmila Bristol, senior director of digital technology platforms at Quintiles, in an Microsoft Office 365 blog post. “That’s changed now that we have switched to Microsoft Office 365, which we chose because it supports mobility, security, business agility and seamless collaboration.”

Rather than taking the usual route of migrating one service at a time, Quntiles moved to all of the Office 365 services simultaneously over an 18-month period, ending in June 2015. This gave employees access to Microsoft Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Skype for Business Online, OneDrive for Business, Office 365 ProPlus and Yammer.

To accelerate employee adoption, Quintiles provided printed and online training materials and made IT staff available at its major offices to provide hands-on training. Employees in other offices had access to a Productivity Hotline, while all staff could use the new Yammer enterprise social media capabilities to engage with an Office 365 Experts group. Each week, the company also analysed its service desk tickets and support data to identify trends in user issues.

“It required detailed planning and significant effort with flawless execution to migrate all these solutions to the cloud simultaneously without impacting e-mail and other critical services for more than 36,000 people,” said Bristol. “We went from an on-premises infrastructure with capacity limitations and disconnected collaboration systems to a unified, cloud-based environment where employees work seamlessly together across locations, on any device, using communication modes that they are comfortable with.”

Quintiles’ new Office 365 suite has empowered employees to become more productive and communicate and collaborate easily across geographies and time zones. Office 365 ProPlus also ensures that employees are able to access the latest productivity programs on all of their devices, while documents are now stored in the cloud in OneDrive for Business. This will enable employees to access information on any Quintiles-managed device.

“With very careful, advanced planning and exceptional teamwork worldwide, we’ve been able to truly transform the way our 36,000 employees are working with each other and our customers on Office 365, bringing people and knowledge together for a healthier world,” said Bristol.