Wyeth: Transformation of an R&D Organization

Wyeth is one of the world’s largest research-driven pharmaceutical and health care products companies. But as successful as the company is, it still faces many of the same challenges all companies do: marketplace pressures like price and regulatory pressures, escalating costs, and demand for growth; competition; and the need to increase output from a finite pipeline.

With research and development costs increasing and output continuing to fall across the entire pharmaceutical industry, the management at Wyeth realized they must improve productivity in R&D, while ensuring the alignment of priorities across groups and enhancing accountability throughout the organization.

With these goals in mind, Wyeth looked to ActiveStrategy in 2001 to provide them with the tools to meet their performance management objectives. ActiveStrategy helped Wyeth by:

• Providing a web-accessible custom interface to provide a scorecard view
• Cascading objectives through the organization in a simple, structured process
• Aligning people to strategic objectives and linking an incentive compensation program to timely achievement of milestones

The program encompassed more than 600 users across four to five levels of R&D management. Wyeth’s dedication, along with ActiveStrategy’s direction, has led to distinct, measurable gains, including:

• Discovery output that has been dramatically higher four years in a row
• A much higher number of projects advanced to early clinical development
• An increase in early phase success rates
• More and more milestones being achieved on time

Throughout the process, Wyeth dramatically changed their R&D organization by developing a culture of performance and change. They initiated a series of more than 40 “gut wrenching” breakthrough process improvement projects, and made key organizational and personnel changes where necessary. They also managed to obtain alignment while maintaining an obsessive focus on productivity, efficiency, and innovation.

Building upon the success experienced in the R&D organization over several years of active use, Wyeth deployed ActiveStrategy Enterprise software as their organization-wide performance framework, starting from the CEO and working down and across the global leadership team. This will enable them to ultimately align their entire global workforce to key top-level strategies via the cascaded performance dashboard framework.