Stories about: Pfizer

Service-oriented architecture promises many positives: resource reuse, application integration, business agility and infrastructure flexibility, among others. But never do SOA proponents claim ease of management as one of the technology's glories.

By 2003, pharmaceutical giant Pfizer found itself with a costly business problem: Paper. Reams of paper. Mountains of paper. Pfizer was up to its neck in the stuff

Completely contrary to what many have preached for awhile now, the naked truth is that educating the CEO about technology is a waste of time and we need to stop. Why? We've just run out of time. Digitization has just met globalization and CEOs of companies that say no to customer demands will lose to those who just say yes-whether the latter can truly deliver to those needs or not.

In effect, offshoring has grown up. In its infancy, just a handful of adventurous companies sent highly codified work overseas. During its rebellious adolescence, it stirred a furious national debate, and the practice's previously unrecognized management challenges and hidden costs came to light.

As an undercover agent with the US Drug Enforcement Administration and the Food and Drug Administration, Aaron Graham saw firsthand how counterfeit drugs can slip into the pharmaceutical supply chain. Graham, now VP and chief security officer for Purdue Pharma, once posed as the manager of an "institutional pharmacy" selling drugs at a discount to secondary wholesalers who were then supposed to sell them to nursing homes. Soon after he began, his phone started ringing. Dozens of smaller pharmaceutical wholesale companies were calling, desperate to buy his drugs. These secondary or "grey market" wholesalers scour the country and the world for low-price drugs they can sell back to major wholesalers for a profit. In addition to trawling for institutional pharmacies, some secondary wholesalers have been known to purchase counterfeit drugs from criminal organizations in places such as China, Thailand or Colombia.

Is competition within your company healthy? It can be. Here's how to highlight its benefits and minimize its risks

Managing multiple outsourcing vendors is costly and complex, and in order to control contracts and providers, smart CIOs are using vendor dashboards and training their staff in finance.

The world's biggest factory is also a fake goods hotbed. Here are 13 ways to protect your company.

The nature of IT risk is changing, reducing the effectiveness of traditional risk management approaches

Integration specialist teams - with concentrated expertise and authority - are making over systems integration at more and more companies

Fed up with spending big bucks for systems that don't deliver an enterprise view of information, companies are turning to supply chain intelligence solutions to improve corporate performance.