BACKGROUND
Hikal Limited is engaged in the manufacturing of various chemical intermediates, specialty chemicals, active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) and contract research activities. Established in 1988, Hikal is a reliable partner to companies in the pharmaceutical, animal health, biotech, crop protection and specialty chemical industries. The company offers pharmaceuticals and agrochemicals.
The company has operations in India, Europe, the United States, Canada and South East Asia. Hikal has five manufacturing facilities in India at Maharashtra (Taloja and Mahad), Gujarat (Panoli) and Bengaluru (Jigani) and a research & technology centre at Pune.
The objective of engaging our services was to digitise the Research & Development (R&D), Quality Assurance (QA) and production documents stored across their plant locations and to gain visibility into digitised documents by implementing an effective digital information management system.
CHALLENGES
- Hikal had stored all its R&D, QA and production related documents at their plant locations in hard copies.
- These files were physically retrieved every time it had to be accessed. Since document level tagging wasn’t implemented, entire files had to be retrieved even for accessing a single document.
- Users did not have real time access to the documents.
- At time of an audit or internal requirement, a request was raised to the team managing the physical records. The required documents were then searched manually. Once located, the required were retrieved and shared with the requisition team. This system of tracing, locating, retrieving and delivering records was inefficient as it was excessively time-consuming.
- Role-based access management to documents stored wasn’t practiced and implemented.
SOLUTION
- Crown implemented a digital document management system (DMS) to provide an end to end solution for managing documents right from scanning documents to uploading and storing in the DMS.
- Folders created in the DMS were categorized and segregated based on the department and plant locations for ease of access.
- After consultation with every department, document types were created in the tool along with the fields that will assist users to search the documents and pull reports from the DMS.
OUTCOME
Hikal has been witnessing the benefits of implementing a purpose-built DMS from 2016 onwards:
- Crown provided a central repository for documents belonging to various departments, plants and office locations.
- Users now have real time access to the documents and don’t have rely on physical retrieval of documents thereby improving turn-around-times (TAT) associated with these activities
- Only authorized users can access the documents pertaining to department/location.
- Access control is now provided at document level thereby restricting access to confidential documents.
- Eradicated sharing of documents via mail. Accessing documents using document management system is safe, secure and makes locating documents easier compared to searching several emails which is time-consuming and often unwieldy.
- Improved collaboration and sharing of documents internally or with auditors.
- Complete audit trail of every action taken by user is captured in DMS with date and time stamp making tracking and monitoring more efficient and easier.
