The Power of Collaboration: How BioPhorum Increased Productivity with the Microsoft Suite

BioPhorum is a collaborative network for change within the biopharmaceutical industry. The company brings together the brightest minds with the mission to create an environment for their members to connect, collaborate and accelerate progress that benefits all parties.    

BioPhorum consists of 12 Phorums directing more than 150 workstreams with industry changing initiatives from thousands of experts. Each workstream is a project team which brings together experts from across the biopharmaceutical industry to solve problems by learning from each other.  

The Challenge

BioPhorum was seeking a solution that allowed real-time collaboration across projects as well as “single source of truth” management of who engaged in these projects. It was important that when managing these collaborations, the solution was efficient and allowed viewing of who is engaged in a project and having capabilities to grant relevant access to a project’s content.    

At the outset, this ambition required migrating from Google applications and iMeet Central to a Microsoft solution which included applications across Microsoft’s suite (Dynamics, SharePoint, Power BI, Power Platform, Entra as well as a range of custom Azure apps).   

The Solution

BioPhorum’s platform initiative, Platform One, was focused on two ambitions: To make the member experience more engaging while also making the operational management of the member community easier. TSG designed and delivered a Microsoft-led technology solution, Platform One, which took advantage of interoperability between different elements of Microsoft’s offering. Together we migrated all the pre-existing systems into Platform One.   

BioPhorum has several thousand project team members within the collaboration, all of whom are subject matter experts in various fields participating on projects with colleagues from across the industry.   

The Results

BioPhorum has seen multiple benefits from the implementation of Microsoft solutions, including:   

Improved collaboration experience: Project team members are now able to collaborate on documents in real-time using SharePoint in a structured “extranet” environment. The management of users and SharePoint sites is controlled from Dynamics using custom Azure apps.   

Provision of better management information to customers: All customer information on how the collaboration is benefiting their organisations is now available directly to customers as Power BI reports which are delivered through the SharePoint Hub system.  

Reduced onboarding time of new project team members: The IT systems steps of an onboarding process has been reduced by more than half as there is now a single business process on Dynamics which triggers a range of underlying systems automations.  

Real-time reporting: Coordinating reporting across the entire collaboration used to take multiple days, and now is now accessible in near real-time using Power BI.   

Reduced time consolidating feedback: Time taken to consolidate feedback within documents reduced from hours per document, coordinating inputs to a single review of feedback within a single document.