Office of the Future Pfizer

All workers around the world share the same dream “a magic button” for all problems. Just click it, and someone else will do annoying project for you.

The magic button became reality for 10,000 Pfizer employees. OOF (Office Of the Future) allows knowledge workers get rid of routine and mind-numbing work and task and spend their time more efficiently.

OOF was born of a financial crisis. In 2005, with the anticipated loss of patent protection for Lipitor and no potential blockbuster in the pipeline to fill the anticipated revenue gap, Pfizer was looking for ways to cut costs and increase efficiencies. They launched an initiative called Adapting to Scale, aimed at centralizing and standardizing processes to improve operational efficiencies.  

After analyzing the activities of Pfizer employees, he learned that they spend 20% to 40% of their time in non-core work: creating documents, manipulating and analyzing spreadsheets, scheduling meetings, and researching. People who were hired to develop strategies and innovate were Googling and making PowerPoints.

The decision came with a ‘one click’ system to access support. Who is at the other end of that magic button? Two outsourcing companies in India.

OOF has simple interface. When an employee needs help with a task or a project, he/she clicks the OOF button in Microsoft Outlook, a single triage worker in India receives the request and assigns it to a team, and the team leader calls the employee to clarify the larger purpose. The team leader then sends back an email specifying the cost. At this point, the Pfizer employee can say yes or no.

Once the work is completed, the customer supplies feedback through the system which allows us to track and measure the effectiveness of partners as well as track users and usage trends. This not only allows for continuous improvement along the way but also allows employees to easily secure and assign resources, manage projects to a timeline, deliver output, be invoiced, pay for the work direct from their cost center and provide feedback on the deliverable as well as their total experience (an all new concept).

The benefits of OOF are very impressive:

• Solution helps 10,000 employees work better, faster and less expensively
• PfizerWorks gives colleagues back 66,500 hours of self-reported, productive time that can be re-focused on high value work
• For OOF services, Pfizer pays $15 to $35 per worker hour, far less than they'd pay Harvard managers, whose rates typically start at $215 per hour
• Knowledge worker support is available 24 hours a day, 5 days a week

This strategic collaboration allows Pfizer get value addition and innovation from the knowledge worker when the person is freed from the routine part of their jobs with the latitude to focus on the real "core" of the problem.

Pfizer’s engagement with external parties can be described in a simple table:

Usa focuses on strategy, innovation, networking, critical thinking, collaboration, knowledge work. on the other hand India: paperwork, googling, creating documents, spreadsheets, creating documents and scheduling meetings.