Syneos Health Builds a Workplace of the Future with Wrike

Syneos Health is a fully integrated, end-to-end biopharmaceutical solutions organization that provides new and innovative capabilities to healthcare and research customers worldwide.

With over 28,000 employees operating in 110 countries, Syneos Health works to deliver value across both the small and large customer continuum, enabling purpose-built solutions to help customers in biopharmaceutical industries successfully bring new clinical and commercial therapies to market. By better accelerating customer performance and addressing client needs to fit modern market realities, Syneos Health helps to shorten the distance from lab to life, bringing important new therapies to patients efficiently and effectively.

The Challenge

Tasked with handling thousands of complex projects across multiple teams around the globe, operations at Syneos Health were starting to strain as they attempted to handle an increasingly heavier digital workload through emails, Excel, in-house proprietary task management systems, manual organization, and a network of disconnected systems.

In order to do their best work, they needed a unified and scalable work management solution that could better clarify project requirements for incoming tasks, provide survey tools for gathering data on work performance, and seamlessly integrate into internal processes.

“Back in 2017, we were working with an in-house system to manage tasks, but it provided us little in terms of functionality and flexibility," says Sherrie Besecker, Creative Technology Manager at Syneos Health. “We needed something that provided us real-time visibility into project pipelines, detailed status updates, and a unified management system that allowed us to map out each step of our work processes from ideation to execution.”

The Solution

When the Syneos Health team began their search for a better way to work, they conducted a survey involving their operations teams and project managers. Results had uncovered the need for a platform that provided on-demand, real-time visibility into timelines and pipelines, with dashboards and status updates that could be shared across the organization. They found various project management platforms and also experimented with an internally-developed, open-source tool. Among those options, Wrike uniquely fit the bill – a robust, flexible solution that unified their needs and processes into one platform.

“Our reliance on disconnected management systems and manual processes resulted in inefficiencies and redundancies across our workflows. It was time for a change,” Besecker mentions. “The moment our teams saw Wrike, we heard a resounding 'yes' – it was the one system that met each and every one of our team’s comprehensive and complex requirements.“

Providing real-time visibility to streamline projects

With Wrike, Syneos Health could stay agile when working on complex projects requiring real-time visibility. They were able to integrate no-hassle routing and reviewing, centralize project mapping, and make use of standardized blueprints to scale and clarify their project management processes.

"Historically, for us, our greatest challenge was getting full visibility into timelines – before Wrike, it was very difficult to plan resources, distribute workloads, and prioritize projects,” notes Besecker. “Wrike enabled us to keep up with our workloads and optimize our processes by helping us understand in real-time what was happening with our projects."

Saving time and resources with automated processes

The addition of automated, global dashboards has enabled Syneos Health to build custom-built reports and spreadsheets with no need for manual updating and sharing. By leveraging digital tools to do the more tedious, repetitive work for them, their teams have saved countless hours and redirected valuable resources into more impactful work.

"Previously, project managers were spending hours updating huge, impractical spreadsheets by hand. We’ve now cut those hours spent updating down to zero," says Besecker.

Automated statuses and dashboards, combined with a unified and streamlined work intake inbox, made kicking off new projects a breeze, helping the Syneos Health teams deliver projects more efficiently and effectively.

Developing scalable processes that enable wall-to-wall deployment

As Besecker began to integrate Wrike further into Syneos Health’s systems, more and more teams saw the potential of Wrike to better align cross-functional goals and workflow organization. As an enterprise-wide solution with over 1,500 existing users and 1,200 more employees onboarding in the near future, Wrike has helped establish visibility into process strategies across multiple teams, helping the organization scale better as a whole.

"Customized workflows and adoptable request forms have enabled us to create new projects in a snap – cutting down preparation time from half an hour to five minutes. It's an incredibly efficient system that simplifies otherwise complex and dynamic workflows into something more  shareable and scalable.”

By utilizing Blueprints, building component libraries, and connecting them through unified and standardized forms, Syneos Health was able to create streamlined workflows that provided teams with everything they needed to do their best work.

The next steps

Through Wrike, Syneos Health was able to integrate and deploy a unified work management system capable of building future-proof, scalable workflows that support enterprise-wide collaboration. Their teams were able to save time and resources by automating repetitive yet critical tasks, improved productivity and efficiency by streamlining complex, dynamic workflows, and increased visibility into projects across the board through standardized blueprints and shareable dashboards.

“We’ve really been able to customize and create our ideal workplace of the future,” says Besecker. “Wrike has become the lifeblood of our day-to-day operations – helping us achieve our important mission of bringing new therapies to patients more efficiently than ever.”