On The Market:

First Consulting Group Unveils FirstDoc M&S

First Consulting Group Inc unveiled a major new electronic content management product to automate and streamline the marketing and sales operations of pharmaceutical companies.

The new product, FirstDoc M&S (marketing and sales), provides a comprehensive, pre-packaged, and configurable electronic content management solution for marketing, sales, medical affairs information and promotional materials processes.

FCG built FirstDoc M&S using the industry's best practices, state-of-the-art technology and consulting services to address the complex content management demands involved in the creation of effective marketing and sales documentation and promotional items for the pharmaceutical industry.

FirstDoc M&S is an extension of the FirstDoc Solution Suite, FCG's comprehensive tool set built upon the widely used Documentum 4i electronic content management solutions. The FirstDoc solution suite, launched in 1999, has become a widely used solution for pharmaceutical companies, with more than 20 FirstDoc clients globally. FirstDoc M&S is designed specifically to meet the needs of marketing and sales groups in life sciences organizations and is based upon FCG's experience in implementing more than 120 Documentum-based applications. The new system will complement and further extend the strategic content management capability of the FirstDoc product suite, which already includes FirstDoc R&D, for research and development operations, and FirstDoc GMP, for good manufacturing practices.

FirstDoc M&S is a configurable product that manages common marketing and sales documents using industry-proven document types, best practices and business rules. It ensures that marketing and sales documents are managed in accordance with regulatory guidelines while improving sales force effectiveness and better managing costs. FirstDoc M&S allows an organization to add or modify to the base functionality for custom business documents and processes. The product can be deployed much more rapidly and cost effectively than a traditional custom-built solution due to configuration capabilities, streamlined testing and validation efforts, and pre-defined business rules to meet the business needs of marketing and sales.

Jeffrey Klein, vice president of Content Management Technologies and Solutions at First Consulting Group, said, "Marketing and sales within pharmaceuticals is highly regulated with complex documents just as any part of the drug discovery, development and distribution process. With FirstDoc M&S, the pharmaceutical industry for the first time has a flexible and reliable product for managing the entire marketing and sales content knowledge chain."

FirstDoc M&S provides robust functionality including:

• Streamlined electronic creation, review approval and Web dissemination of marketing and sales materials including: Sales policies, territory reviews, forecasts, contracts, competitive analysis and more
• Medical inquiry response letters
• Advertising materials and labeling
• Promotional materials
• Marketing research and intelligence
• Automated scheduled document effectiveness
• Workflow facilities designed to support legal, medical, regulatory and FDA review and correspondence
• Simultaneous routing to various groups of serial, parallel and team processing
• Periodic document review and expiration
• Automatic status transition and notification of document status changes
• A secured, electronic document repository
• Custom integration with CRM tools
• Maximum return on investment

Electronic content management technology is critical to the success of life sciences organizations facing the challenge of reducing the time required to get products to worldwide markets. Reducing time to market requires highly efficient research and development and commercialization processes that utilize technology effectively. Throughout drug development, an organization generates tremendous volumes of information at various stages of the process, from pre-clinical testing through submission and post-marketing approval. Efficiently managing and leveraging the documentation that results from these processes is the key to expediting products to market. FCG has built the FirstDoc product suite to meet this demand for the life sciences industry.

About First Consulting Group

First Consulting Group is a leading provider of information-based consulting, integration and IT outsourcing services for healthcare, pharmaceutical and other life sciences organizations in North America and Europe. The firm's services are designed to increase its clients' operations effectiveness, resulting in reduced costs, improved customer service, enhanced quality of patient care and the more rapid introduction of new pharmaceutical compounds. More information about FCG is available through the FCG World Wide Web site at www.fcg.com or by calling 800-345-0957.

Contact First Consulting Group, Susan DeAngelis, 610-989-7867, sdeangelis@fcg.com.