Roche: Editorial planning for hundreds of employees worldwide

Roche's team responsible for corporate communications in Switzerland, was looking for a tool to help plan multichannel communications for their target market. The team initially thought that the commercial SaaS offerings available on the market would suffice. The team had worked with Google spreadsheets, Percolate, Desk-Net, etc., which helped them understand the advantages and disadvantages of these solutions for content marketing planning. The Swiss communications team wanted to avoid the disadvantages by commissioning YMC to create a web calendar tailored to the team, based on a third-party solution available as a SaaS with API.

YMC worked closely with the Roche team to achieve high usability of the editorial planning calendar. The team was very satisfied with the results. During development of the calendar, and also during its use, the team came up with new ideas for necessary functions which could not be implemented on the basis of the backend of the SaaS solution. After consulting with YMC, Roche decided to replace the third-party solution with a back-end solution created by YMC. This paved the way for optimal editorial online planning of corporate communications. The standalone solution became so good, that hundreds of employees and affiliates worldwide are now working with it. The YMC solution became a business-critical asset for Roche. That’s why the pharma giant decided to have it further developed by the in-house IT department in the future.

The evolution and success of the in-house editorial online planning tool at Roche was largely based on the experience of YMC. This includes not only the technological know-how for web applications, but also the understanding for internal and external communications processes in a business like Roche. This experience was strengthened by YMC's willingness and ability to accompany innovative processes. YMC’s competence was demonstrated by the project success: The editorial planning calendar is now regarded by the Roche Group as a central part of global infrastructure.

The purely technical requirements for the editorial calendar changed at every stage of the project and high usability became increasingly important the more functionality was developed specifically for Roche.

Eventually, YMC developed a standalone software product for Roche that has an immensely high acceptance rate. Such success can only be achieved by a very good understanding of the goals and expectations of the users. YMC acted just like a start-up that creates a product for a pilot customer. Only due to YMC's comprehensive expertise and experience, could it later become an in-house standard application that could be scaled worldwide and further developed in-house. By using proven open source components, YMC was able to implement Roche’s solution quickly, cost-efficiently and hands-on, enabling the corporation to focus on user benefits and business value.

As can be seen in respect to the editorial solution for Roche, innovation often happens via incremental solutions. It then takes courage to take the next step towards achieving the optimal solution. This is only possible if new functionality can be developed, tested and evaluated quickly using an agile approach. Since Roche could always rely on YMC regarding an agile approach, the risk for the Swiss team was manageable and they could become a champion within the group, whose solution was adopted as a corporate standard.

The functionality of the editorial calendar is limited to the essentials and is clearly laid out, enabling very efficient planning of group-wide corporate communications: There is a month and year view, which shows the communication activities of the next days or weeks.

Activities can be filtered by communication channel or topic - all channels can be included in the planning, be it Twitter, print brochures or the LCD display in the entrance hall. Automatically generated statistics and reports can be used to analyse the achievement of KPIs. Individual activities can be assigned to events, stories and online channels. The high quality of the project, which resulted in a standalone product, took Roche by storm and became part of the core IT infrastructure.