Product – Synapse MRMi – Enterprise Marketing Resource Management

Managing enterprise marketing activities is becoming harder. Strategy flows across continents, regulation is increasing, thinking must be shared, and the marketing intellectual process has to be justified as never before. The window of opportunity for effective lifecycle management is shrinking as product and customer lifecycles reduce, the number of competitors increases, and the pace gets faster.

Synapse MRMi is a best-of-breed marketing resource management system, currently used by two of the top ten pharmaceutical companies at global and regional level to structure and co-ordinate strategic planning across global, regional, and country-level planning teams.

Synapse MRMi was designed and built specifically to help pharmaceutical companies manage, administer, track, and analyse their marketing efforts, from strategic brand planning at a global level, down to local brand planners working at a country level.

Whilst a plethora of tools have emerged in the ERP and CRM space, the marketing function has been sidelined as the ‘difficult’ area; where the processes are often unstructured and the results are difficult to measure or track. The challenge is to make sense of fragmented systems and processes which often use an insecure combination of workgroup-style documents, presentations, and Excel models.

Synapse MRMi answers this challenge by integrating your planning within a secure central system, consolidating processes and data into a flexible template-driven set of marketing management tools, without compromising the proprietary processes that make your marketing organization unique.

Features include:

• Full support for global, regional, and country-level planning, with content -flows between planning functions definable at implementation. Plans are mapped to your planning process, defined as a series of slides, pages, and items. Geographies, planning periods, and product hierarchies are defined at implementation.
  
• Comprehensive library of pharmaceutical marketing process steps and visualisations; e.g. Customer Segmentation, Environment Assumptions, Patient Flow, and Advocacy Analysis.
  
• Corporate-portal single point of entry to your strategic planning databases, via Internet, extranet, or intranet deployed feature-rich browser-based interface. No requirement for any PC installation of software. Can be deployed via the extranet to provide access for advertising and marketing agencies, improving communication and increasing efficiency.
  
• Extended team-based security model allowing planners to work on team plans. Access to specific areas of plans can be granted at a granular level meaning that multiple planners can work on the same plans concurrently.
  
• Sophisticated collaborative features to mirror your marketing strategy creation, communications, and approvals process via the use of functionality such as access rule-sets, forum-reviewing, commentary, approvals, versioning, and publication.
  
• Integrated knowledge management features to allow planners to store supporting information (for example competitive intelligence data) in any format; e.g. Word, PowerPoint, Excel, etc. Content can be uploaded and hyper-linked at both plan and granular step level giving you the tools to support your thinking and create silos of intelligence within the central planning system.
  
• Fast-track implementation kit to migrate your planning process into the Synapse MRMi model, using XML configuration files to translate your plan structure / content into the Synapse plan repository. Global implementations have been completed in as little as 6 weeks.


• Simple intuitive menus for navigating plans, based on the web-browser ‘back / forward’ standard for content navigation.
  
• Best-practise plans with instructional and sample content to provide guidance at each step of creating plan content.
  
• Total plan content flexibility with the option to substitute non-core planning steps with inline document content such as PowerPoint documents. Inline content is edited online and stored centrally within the plan databases. Content can be cloned, steps can be renamed, and plans can be versioned.
  
• Forward planning support with features such as ‘copy-forward’ which take a plan and migrate it to a new planning period, updating chronological data accordingly.
  
• Email alerting based on event-triggers such as content updates or forumbroadcasts.
  
• Full audit trails showing plan contributors and their contributions.
  
• Dedicated data-mart fed from the operational Synapse database, and reorientated into star-schemas to provide portfolio planning, financials consolidation, and comparative-thinking analysis.
  
• Enterprise application integration toolkit (EAI API) via Java EJB connectors to feed data between ERP / CRM systems and Synapse MRMi.
  
• Best-of-breed technology using robust, scalable (to the 1000s of users), servletbased J2EE web-framework on Oracle or SQL Server databases.
  
• Implementation, hosting, support, training, and maintenance services available.