Embracing Digitalisation For The Future of Healthcare
In the global medical field, many diseases such as cancer, inflammatory diseases, and metabolic diseases still lack drug treatments or have existing drugs that are able to address the medical needs of patients — and that was how Chugai Pharmabody Research came about. A drug discovery research company established in Singapore and funded by a leading Japanese pharmaceutical company (Chugai Pharmaceutical), its mission is to develop new antibody and mid-size molecule drug clinical candidates for a variety of targets.
But as with many organisations, inefficient workflow processes can hinder a company’s drive to move the needle in the healthcare industry and Chugai Pharmabody sought to address that with the use of the right technology and solutions.
We spoke with Mr. Shin-Ichi Sato (Admin Head) and Ms. Lai Yee Ng (Senior Accounts Officer) from Chugai Pharmabody, to understand the challenges they face in the industry and how Canon’s document management solution has helped improve their workflow process and productivity in the recent years.
What are some of the challenges you face in the pharmaceutical industry?
New diseases and medical challenges are constantly being discovered and it gets harder to keep up with the growing times. We saw the need and that’s when we pledged in 2019 to work towards building a sustainable patient-centric healthcare while maintaining the highest standards possible with our unique strength in science and technology. By developing new advances in existing or completely new modalities, strengthening technology platforms and incorporating digital transformation into drug development, we believe we can solve the unmet medical needs one step at a time and truly make a change in the world.
Why did you choose to go with Canon’s solutions?
Reliability is one of the key factors we look for in a long-term business partner and that was evident in Canon. Based on our requirements, the solutions offered by Canon were able to fulfill them comprehensively, giving us systems and solutions that are stable, scalable and flexible.
Canon’s Print Management Solution, uniFLOW, and Document Management Solution, Therefore™, were two of the main solutions we adopted. uniFLOW stood out to us as it allows print jobs to be collected from any copiers within the company’s premise, giving our team greater accessibility and efficiency in the office.
Therefore™ Document Management Solution, on the other hand, has played a pivotal role in transforming our day-to-day operations. It gave us easy access to our company’s documents remotely while allowing records to be stored electronically with secure archiving, instead of physical records. Business efficiency has greatly improved as we do away with paper filing.
This empowers our employees with time for more value-added work and allows us to optimise our valuable resources since there is no longer a need for us to set aside storage space for physical records. We have seen a marked improvement in terms of our operational efficiency and we believe this helps us to better focus our time, effort, and resources on drug development and research in the long run.
What is the greatest difference after the adoption of Canon’s solutions?
We started out with Canon’s multi-functional devices, imageRUNNER ADVANCE series back in 2012, and added on Therefore™ Document Management Solution in 2019 when we wanted a solution to improve our overall work efficiency. We were able to automate some of our processes using the workflows in Therefore™, from the capturing of content in various formats to the approval and tracking in each step of the process. This ensures that all transactions are processed and traceable in a secured environment.
At the start of the pandemic in 2020, we were restricted by the number of non-essential staff working in the office and we reaped the benefits of Therefore™ Document Management Solution. With the system in place, our administrative team could work from home and handle their tasks with ease, without any disruptions to their operations. They could literally work anywhere and be able to access records any time of the day!
As we shift towards a paperless workflow in the office, we understand there are instances where prints might still be necessary. With uniFLOW installed in our Canon imageRUNNER ADVANCE multi-function devices, we were able to track, manage the printing requirements and minimise wastages in the company.
The adoption of the Canon Business Service (CBS) in the scanning of backlog documents helped us to improve our productivity as well, with a solution that enables us to comply with government regulations and be ESG compliant.
How was your customer service experience working with Canon?
Overall, it has been a pleasant experience. We appreciate the Canon team for taking the time and effort to better understand our document management needs, and develop a solution that works for us. The Canon business service team was very patient in attending to the different requirements from the respective teams in the Admin Division, allowing different indexes from the different teams to be easily tracked and recorded.
The Sales and Marketing team went above and beyond to ensure that we were well taken care of. The regular updates on product enhancements and new systems available to boost our operational efficiency were very helpful. From the development to the integration of the systems and solutions, it was all completed without a hitch in a swift manner, thanks to the post-sales team. We are truly grateful to have Canon as our business partner, and we are confident that they can help us improve our ability to address future challenges and maintain a sustainable environment through automation.
If you would like to find out more about our document and print solutions and how they can be implemented in your organisation or venue, visit us here for more information. Read more success stories on the various business solutions Canon has provided for our valued customers here. Follow Canon Singapore on Facebook and LinkedIn for the latest updates.
