First Consulting Group Releases FirstPoint™ 1.0 for Life Sciences and becomes Microsoft Gold Certified Partn
LONG BEACH, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–FCG (NASDAQ:FCGI) today announced the release of FirstPoint™, a Microsoft® Office-Based Application to meet the needs of enterprise content management (ECM). FirstPoint is a flexible, cost effective, and scalable solution that can be easily configured to meet specific business requirements of a life sciences organization. FCG also offers FirstPoint preconfigured with time-proven industry best practices to meet the needs of the entire life sciences organization – from R&D to marketing & sales.
In addition to managing regulated content for the enterprise, FirstPoint’s rules based workflow engine can facilitate collaborative processes across the many functions often overlooked in ECM deployments such as such as legal, finance, and human resources, as well as secure external collaboration. Companies realize value through extensive automation of what were once time consuming and counterproductive practices.
“The market is demanding a way to simplify content management especially in terms of usability, platform consolidation, and collaboration,” said Jeff Klein, Vice President of Global Solution Sales and Product Development for FCG’s life sciences practice. “FCG has answered that demand with FirstPoint – a user-friendly, enterprise-class application that utilizes familiar Microsoft Office tools such as Word and Outlook. Leveraging Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007, FirstPoint allows companies continued access to their existing investments, while capitalizing on FCG’s software innovations and industry-leading best practices that were developed as part of the FirstDoc product suite.”
“FirstPoint is an enterprise class solution that offers a seamless environment for enterprise collaboration and regulated document management needs – in one application,” commented Paul Mattes, Managing Director; Healthcare and Life Sciences, Microsoft Corp. “FirstPoint will benefit companies of all sizes whether just beginning to develop an ECM strategy or looking for greater efficiency and improved productivity on the Microsoft platform.”
FirstPoint helps companies eliminate the need to manage global and disparate repositories, deal with multiple vendors for complex customizations, incur costly upgrades, and extensive training of end users.
FirstPoint offers benefits across the enterprise and its associated network of partners:
- Microsoft Office-Based user experience for ease of use, greater collaborative participation and increased productivity
- Collaborative Microsoft Word-based review (e.g. track changes) in a compliant, controlled environment
- FDA 21 CFR Part 11 compliant system including audit trail and electronic signatures
- Established industry best-practice content type and taxonomy model, and automated, rules-driven lifecycle and document processing
- Easily configurable workflows for document collaboration and content organization and assembly for regulatory processes
- Federated metadata-driven approach to harmonize content management usage across multiple repositories
FCG has also announced that it has recently achieved the level of Microsoft Gold Partner certification and that FirstPoint has several prominent early adopter customers.
About FCG
FCG is a leading provider of outsourcing, consulting, systems implementation and integration services and proprietary software products for healthcare, pharmaceutical, and other life sciences organizations throughout North America, Europe and Asia. Through combinations of onsite, offsite and offshore outsourced services, FCG provides low-cost, high-quality offerings to improve its clients’ performance. The firm’s consulting and integration services and proprietary software products increase clients’ operations effectiveness with and through information technology, resulting in reduced costs, improved customer service, enhanced quality of patient care, and more rapid introduction of new pharmaceutical compounds. For more information about FCG, visit www.fcg.com or call 800-345-0957.
