At goBalto, our mission is to accelerate drug development timelines to get medicines to those in need faster. We do this by providing solutions, which make it easy for professionals to collaborate with colleagues and teams from all over the world. (You can view a short demo by clicking here). A key bottleneck users encounter in drug development programs is trying to manage the various relationships and projects across multiple Partners. To help make this process more efficient, we will shortly be releasing “Projects”.
Projects is a web-based collaboration platform, which will enable users to manage both internal and external projects more efficiently. Through Projects, members will be able to quickly build a short list of partners, view contact information, manage multiple discussion threads, track progress and maintain file version tracking – all in a simple intuitive manner. I like to view “Projects” as your central “hub” which provides you with a snapshot view to manage your project’s overall progress.
Here are some of the problems we will solve with “Projects”.
1) Quickly compile a short list of qualified Partners. Use our search engine to quickly build a short list of qualified partners from over 10,000 company listings.
2) Send and track responses from multiple Partners. Use our “bulk inquiry” tool, to send requests for proposals and other messages to multiple companies via a single inquiry. Also monitor which Partners have responded and the timing of their response.
3) Manage and view all of your Partner and People contact information. It’s as simple as inviting your team members and Partner contacts to participate in your Project. goBalto automatically imports the contact information directly into your Project, doing away with re-entering information into an external address book. Should you wish to do so, we make it easy for you download and import the contact information into your address book.
4) Eliminate lengthy chain email. When dealing with multiple vendors and Partners, you generate a-lot of emails. Through goBalto, you can keep a history of your messages in a simple and clean interface. No more digging through your inbox trying to figure out what you agreed to 6 months ago. Through goBalto, you will be able to search the discussion threads to quickly find who said what and when they posted the message.
5) Manage files. Easily view and retrieve files posted to your discussion threads. This comes in handy when trying to pull up previous versions of documents.
To provide you with an idea of what we’re talking about, I have attached two pictures of the visual designs.
Projects “Dashboard”
Through your dashboard, you can see all of your active projects as well as those of your team mates. In addition, you can monitor your recent activity through the “Activity Feed”. The Activity Feed provides you with a real-time update on activities across all of your projects.
Detailed Project View
Here you see the detailed view of an individual Project. Each Project will have it’s own dashboard, enabling you to track and monitor progress related to any specific Project.
Activity Feed: Displays a real-time feed of all of your recent activity related to your specific project.
Discussions: Monitor all of your discussions across numerous contacts and partners related to your project.
Files: Provides a central repository for all of your documents related to your Project. This is great for tracking versions of files such as CDAs, RFPs, RFIs, SFQs, etc.
Partners: Monitor progress active and archived Partners. Track who responded and when.
People: Displays contact information for all of the people (both internal and external) involved in your Project.
Pricing & Subscription
Through Projects, we believe users can generate time savings of over 3 months over the course of a drug development or manufacturing project, translating into roughly $7 million in cost savings. In pricing Projects, we wanted to make sure it is affordable for the vast majority of users who wish to subscribe to it.
We plan on offering three levels of service for Projects.
Basic: Free. Create 1 project and 100MB of disk space.
Premium: $49.95 per month. You can create up to 20 projects and offer 2 GB of disk space.
Premium-Plus: $149.95 per month. You can create an unlimited number of projects and offer 5GB of disk space.
Our approach in building goBalto has always been to design solutions, which YOU would like to see. Therefore, please let us know if there any problems you would like to see solved, and we’ll do our best to get them included in the solution!
Thanks!
Jae
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Jae, this might be a very good and effective solution, however I have one remark regarding the “ security of the information” uploaded as this is an essential part specially when you have a good business relationship and you have signed a Confidentiality agreement to work with different partners at different projects that might compete with each other. Does your solution secure this “gap”? Please clarify,
Basema
Basema,
Thank you for your comment. We take the privacy of member data very seriously at goBalto.
To ensure that only the member can view their Project information, we utilize SSL. SSL stands for Secure Socket Layer. This technology allows users to establish sessions with Internet sites that are secure, meaning they have minimal risk of external violation. Once inside the goBalto site, you are secure through our use of SSL technology. This is the same technology utilized by online financial institutions all over to world to ensure that financial transactions are not breached.
In addition, other members and companies will NOT be able to view your Project contents. For example, if you were to receive confidential information from a business partner, only you (and whomever you provided access privileges to – such as a working colleague) would be able to view the confidential information. The data is restricted to ensure that no one else can view your sensitive data, unless you specifically grant them access.
So far, I have gotten a lot of resistance from clients to using web-based collaboration tools, for just the reason that people are afraid info will get stolen or confidentiality breached. And this is from little companies with not much to steal.
Hey Ron. Good points. There are a number of ways we will be addressing the web-based solution, from both of physical/hardware as well software. However, at the end of the day, no amount of security will address people’s innate fear of using a web-based tool.
It all comes down to each individual’s and company’s level of comfort in using internet technologies. Many people have no issues banking online, which in my opinion is alot more sensitive than sharing documents. However, I recognize that group-think comes into play here and as more people see folks using the goBalto platform successfully, the more others will come on board.
I agree with the comments posted to the point of security so far and wish to raise one point not yet raised. There is a risk in document sharing in the physical realm as well as virtual which should be considered. For those who do not lock their door every time they step away, or those who mail documents, or send them as attachments to emails there may be less risk using a online platform like goBalto. More identity theft in the financial world is still perpetuated in the physical realm than online, I would assume the same could be true in this instance. That is just my 2 cents.