For a pharmaceutical company like Wyeth, no function is more important than research and development--the process of finding the new drugs that will lead to patents and profits. And for the information systems group that supports R&D, business process management (BPM) is emerging as a key technology and management strategy to make that function more efficient.
In fact, R&D's early success at using this technology and methodology to cut software development time in half has sparked interest from other divisions of the company that are looking to start their own BPM projects. But for Wyeth, the real payoff lies in BPM's potential to help the company define business processes and unify its information systems to break down barriers between organizational and geographic divisions and to improve collaboration and innovation.
Source: CIO, http://cio.com