The WISDOM Document Management System

In the early 1990s, the Upjohn Fine Chemicals Division in Portage, Michigan was in need of an electronic document management system. After evaluating the different vendors who had such a product, they decided upon a Documentum-based system. This would be the first use of a Documentum product at Upjohn. Document types covered would include SOPs, validation documents, technical reports, drawings, permits and manuals.

In 1995, an Upjohn configuration of Documentum called WISDOM (Worldwide Integrated System for Document Management) was implemented, The docbase used was named pnudoc1. Ken Arthur and Chris Gidman were the IT support. Right at that time, the Fine Chem business person who had led the evaluation, configuration and implementation of Documentum left Upjohn. Jeremy Winkworth was drafted in as the first business system leader of the production WISDOM system, even though he was in the Control Division. Cliff Sacks was the system champion in the Fine Chem leadership team.

As electronic document management was new to the Fine Chem group, training was a comprehensive program that gave out binders full of information and featured multiple hands-on classroom training sessions.

WISDOM worked very well for Fine Chem. I don’t remember any crises or big problems. We had regular meetings with business representatives for different groups within Fine Chem in Building 91. It was a good implementation and a good system. Around 1998, the Drug Product site leadership team, headed by Redgy Coucke, approved an extension of WISDOM to Kalamazoo Drug Product Manufacturing, which was principally in Building 41. No large changes to the system were needed. Jeremy later left Control for a job in Regulatory and Gary Supp took over as business system leader. Gary led the project to populate WISDOM with Building 41 documents until he too left for a job in Regulatory. Then Sue Kline and Kathy Witliff took over. By now, Ken Arthur and Chris Gidman had both moved on. Steve Arnett and Rick Slater became the principal IT support.

In the late 1990s, Pharmacia Research in Kalamazoo launched a Documentum-based storage system, also called WISDOM. It was supported by Matt Devoe, Jeff Glendening and Marty Hoover in IT. This system fed documents into a CoreDossier application, supported by Carol Hicks, which transformed many documents into a single regulatory submission. The submission was then printed out on Xerox Docutech printers in the basement of Building 298. I remember that for the European Zyvox submission, 250,000 pages were printed over one weekend and then shipped to Europe on the Monday. The shipping cost was $20,000. Nowadays, submissions are all electronic. Not a single page of paper is needed. To avoid confusion between the two WISDOM systems, the manufacturing one was renamed WISDOM pnudoc1.

When Jeremy returned to Control, now called Quality, and joined the API system owner group under Shelley Miller in 2005, he volunteered to be the WISDOM system leader. This offer was gratefully accepted. Shelley was the WISDOM champion. By now, it had 550,000 document in it, a major system by the standards of the time. However, by 2005 Pfizer had owned Pharmacia for 2 years and was planning to cut costs by using “core systems”. These core electronic systems were to be used by every site with only one set of servers, IT support and procedures. Although WISDOM was a popular and effective system for Kalamazoo, its days were numbered.

It was not easy to move away from WISDOM. Plans had to be made and executed to move 550,000 documents. It took a couple of years for Pfizer IT to build a core document management system, which was called PDOCS. It also took time for the Portage site to transfer all non-GMP documents in WISDOM to appropriate systems such as SharePoint. Transferring key documents like SOPs and other GMP documents could not have any mistakes or problems. The PDOCS implementation team, headed up by Jeremy and Kathy Witliff, was up to the job. It was said at the time that moving GMP documents from WISDOM into PDOCS during the summer of 2009 was the smoothest implementation of a Pfizer core system to date. On September 25^th 2009, all user access to WISDOM was switched off.

For 14 years, WISDOM was an excellent system for the Upjohn, Pharmacia and Pfizer manufacturing operations in Portage. I was honored to be both the first and the last business system leader.

Written by Jeremy Winkworth, July 2022