44 India's Best IT Implementations of the year 2005

Continued from page: 7

Friday, June 03, 2005

Optilearn Pfizer Limited, India

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Project Head: Arun Gupta, Senior Director, Business Technology 
Location: All India

This is an e-learning project, which allows Pfizer to conduct tests online for its employees. As far as technology goes, this is just another e-learning project. However, it gives a completely different picture if you look at the environment and manner in which this project has been implemented. For one, a pharmaceutical company has put it to practice. Pharmaceutical sector is an aggressively marketed and defended arena, where even a day of laxity can lose you entire regional markets. As such, a pharma company needs its operatives in the field to stay sharp and atleast one-step ahead of competition. That's where Optilearn comes in handy.

Currently, the role of Optilearn is simple, small and 'humble'. It serves merely to certify Pfizer's thousand or so field representatives, marketing personnel and executives. However, the twist comes from the fact that the company has made certain certifications mandatory for those three rungs of its operation. These certifications ensure that these employees are up to date on the latest, not only on their employer's products and offers, but it also provide valuable feedback to the company about who needs training. 

How it works
We are not going to delve into the programming mechanics of Optilearn. The designated test administrator adds and schedules an exam. Automatically, an e-mail is sent out to all the marketing and sales employees. They are to take the exam by a certain date. To provide some element of unpredictability and test-rigor, the questions and even their multiple-choice answers appear in random order. The tests are also graded according to dynamic difficulty-the tougher the question, the more points awarded to the candidate.

If the candidate cannot appear for the test due to some reason by the given date for some reason, they can re-schedule to take the test. This flexibility allows for Optilearn to be efficient and useful to its maximum.

When Pfizer decided to implement such a solution, they had an important concern. Their in-house application called, Optima, had to interoperate with Optilearn. Optilearn could not, thus, maintain a stand-alone database of users or results, they needed to be shared with Optima. 

For this purpose, Pfizer added a Web service to Optima that authenticated users for Optilearn as well as saved back the results of the certification attempt. This was a key deliverable and once this was achieved, the rest of the system falls into place.

The systems
Optilearn is a browser-based solution that requires just a PC or Mac with a browser to run. It supports both Netscape or IE. For the server-side software, it needs a Windows Server, .NET Framework 1.0 with SP 2, SQL Server 2000 with SP3 to run.

Costs
The entire implementation took Pfizer and Learning Mate about four months (February to June) and costed approximately 10 lakh rupees. They also had to deploy additional hardware worth another 8 lakh rupees. The project is expected to prove its worth over the next three years.

Looking at the future
Now that the basic goal has been achieved, they're starting work on porting it over to the handheld so that it can be used offline. It could, thus, also be put to use to carry around a knowledge base of ready-to- use information about products and technologies offered by Pfizer.

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