Sept. 11, 2000

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Technology Creates A Stir In Lilly's Year Of Discovery

By Steve Konicki

n the same year that Eli Lilly and Co. announced startling discoveries concerning the human genome, the company also discovered a new IT corporate structure that involves upgrading its enterprise resource planning applications, implementing internal corporate portals, developing a knowledge-management strategy, and providing an application that will let Lilly's researchers around the world use their human genome research as a window into the DNA strands that make us all tick.

As Lilly's science created an uproar, the company's IT department set about remaking its 170 sites worldwide--including 15,000 employees in the United States among 30,000 worldwide--into a model of corporate efficiency. Tackling the problem of consolidating the company's divisions and facilities around the world was critical to Lilly's fu-ture. In Lilly's old business model, countries and divisions operated semiautonomously and Internet-speed communication wasn't necessary, says Roy Dunbar, Eli Lilly's CIO and VP of IT.

In the new, centrally managed structure, users needed to be able to access data from anywhere in the company instantly. And, Dunbar says, ERP was part of the answer.

The first step was upgrading from version 4.0 to version 4.5 of SAP's R/3 enterprise resource planning software in the United States as well as in Europe. In the United States, Dunbar says, the company began customizing R/3 4.5 to replace earlier versions of R/3 and disparate legacy systems used for finance and human resources.

Another part of the answer is Web-enabling the Indianapolis company. The company is evaluating offerings from mySAP.com, Plumtree Software Inc., and other portal vendors to determine which product it will use to build an internal company portal to let managers, researchers, salespeople, and customer-service representatives work in a more focused way.

The portal, when linked to SAP's financial applications, will let the company close the books on each of its operations in a shorter time than the four days now required by "a ton of accountants and business analysts pulling information together" from disparate systems, Dunbar says. The portal will replace the corporate intranet, code-named Elvis, that's used for information management and will be built so that whoever needs information on a medication or other products--and has security to see it--will be able to get it instantly.

Lilly, like other pharmaceutical companies, wants to take advantage of the efficiencies of its powerful back-office applications and the Internet in tracking the testing of new medications, reporting adverse reactions, and building disease-management Web sites for patients. The new portal will help there, as well.

The most exciting IT work, and the work Lilly feels is the most sensitive, is its ongoing internal design and development of an application that will let Lilly's researchers around the world use its human genome research.

Dunbar won't say exactly what Lilly is doing, but he does say the company has used the science of informatics, or the study of how people use information, to develop an extremely advanced mechanism through which scientists can search mountains of information in a large and growing number of databases and from that extract DNA sequencing data. The application then can be used to see if a particular pair of DNA sequences might be used to prolong human life. Dunbar says it's as simple as typing in a short sequence, selecting an algorithm, and pressing the "go" button.

"You put our application in front of a scientist who's not an IT guru," Dunbar says, "and all he has to think about is science, not software."

Return to main story, "Prescription For Change:IT."

Illustration by Jeffrey Fisher

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