CEGEDIM

Since 1969, CEGEDIM has been designing exclusive databases and software solutions with a high value added, aimed at healthcare professionals and the health insurance industry. In 2006, CEGEDIM’s turnover was €541 million. After its purchase of Dendrite (specialist in solutions for the pharmaceuticals industry on the American continent and in Asia/Pacific) at the beginning of 2007, its annual pro forma turnover for 2006 will be €877 million. CEGEDIM operates in more than 80 countries and employs almost 7,500 people.

Challenges of Mobility Solutions: Improving the Productivity of Medical Visitors

CEGEDIM manages a pool of 25,000 PDAs which equip a population of medical visitors. PDAs were selected because they cost less than portable PCs. Medical visitors mainly use applications dedicated to the healthcare sector developed by CEGEDIM. They are generally linked to messaging systems. The CEGEDIM solution was developed on Palm in 2002 before the choice focused on Windows Mobile, because of market developments. Connections of devices to the IT system are via GPRS.

In the management of its PDA pool, CEGEDIM encountered several difficulties:

- Problems of network coverage in some countries.

- The wide range of different PDAs due to the various purchases made by CEGEDIM as well as availability of differing devices and operating systems in various countries.

- Integration of the data mobile solution with the Radius authentication solution established in the company.

Benefits of the EveryWAN Solution: Reliable Connexions, Reduction in Costs and Support to Users

Introduction of the solution offered by Sparus started in July 2006, primarily in those areas where CEGEDIM’s clients were dissatisfied with the network conditions. The solution is also in the process of being rolled out in Mexico. EveryWAN meets several requirements:

- Compatibility with the current infrastructure: Adoption of EveryWAN does not involve any modification to applications developed by CEGEDIM.

- Use of EveryWAN in a multi-operator and multinetwork context.

- Reliability of connections due to the incident recovery mechanism which enables the volumes of data transmitted and the associated costs to be reduced.

- Data compression mechanism which enables the increase in volume to be managed and better budget control. In particular, at the time of its first introduction in France and Mexico, CEGEDIM recorded a 64% reduction in data traffic.

- The remote assistance function is of considerable benefit in trouble-shooting and contributes to improving service quality provided by the four people dedicated to the operation of hosted platforms.

- In the medium term, CEGEDIM plans to use EveryWAN for encryption of the data from the PDAs.

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