American multinational pharmaceutical company boosts productivity

‘Clunky’ Competitors

Before implementing Plutora, the global pharmaceutical company used its own in-house system, spreadsheets, whiteboards, phone calls and meetings to manage environments.

“We had tough phone calls and meetings,” says the Quality Assurance Project Lead. “Every project manager had their own separate project plan.”

“We’ve had managers from other departments come to us and say, ‘We like what you’re doing with Plutora. We want to use it too.‘”Project and Release Manager

Users found the in-house system difficult to keep up-to-date, and it required them to work extra hard to find what they needed. Available environments and upcoming changes were scattered over many screens.

“The technology was clunky. The user interface was clunky,” says the Senior Project and Release Manager. “You had to switch between multiple screens and then consolidate the information. It was time-consuming and challenging. Whereas today, looking at Plutora, you have all that information in one shot.”

“We looked at a few competitors. I’m going to steal the credit for doing the homework and telling executive management that Plutora had the most robust suite of options.”

Complete Visibility

Plutora makes release management transparent.

“I have complete visibility, thanks to Plutora’s dashboards and reports,” says the Quality Assurance Project Lead. “All the information about a release, from beginning to end, and all the environments, are in one place. I can see what must happen to get the release into production. Once the release starts, I can see the progression.”

The Senior Project and Release Manager agree, “Plutora has given us the ability to see what’s in the pipeline, the size of the change and what to expect from a risk perspective. We know the impact of the upcoming changes and can prepare for them so that nothing goes wrong in production. We have made significant financial savings and we’ve improved our reputation."

“We knew we had environments but we had no record of how much they were used, how many changes were made to them or who made the changes,” says the Quality Assurance Project Lead. “People are surprised at how many changes we’re making. We can now run reports to see what environments we use in each project. We can even see environment conflicts.”

Global Collaboration

Plutora has integrated global operations and cross-functional teams.

“We have folks in India, Czech Republic, Japan, China, and the United States. All using Plutora,” says the Senior Project and Release Manager. “We have a backend database group, we have a user interface database group. We have Aviva and Galeforce.com. We used to use spreadsheets and emails but Plutora has pulled us all together significantly.”

“We don’t need so many engineers managing our environments,” says the Quality Assurance Project Lead. “We had 2–3 times more people performing the same job. Plutora has given us a significant productivity gain.”

"Plutora is a big success. I use every module on a daily basis. It’s been a great engagement from the beginning and usage is increasing at an exponential rate.”Project and Release Manager

The Senior Project and Release Manager used to receive hundreds of emails each day. “People were asking for updated statuses and so forth,” he says. “When I showed them how to mine that information from Plutora, I got far fewer emails. I think this is the biggest benefit I have seen so far.”

Plutora’s reporting module is invaluable for finding metrics fast. “I use reports when I’m dealing with the executive leadership,” says the Senior Project and Release Manager. “People struggled with different applications to show information. Now if I’m asked ‘What was your planned timeline versus your delivery timeline?’ I can show them a graph in Plutora. This makes my meetings more efficient.”