Quick access to the right information means everything to a health regulatory authority like the Saudi Food and Drug Authority (SFDA) —speeding up the food, drug and medical equipment inspection cycle is critical when there are large volumes of new products that can affect the public’s health. SFDA teamed up with Interactive Saudi Arabia to build the collaboration and Decision Support Environment (Al Bawaba)—an Intranet portal solution that consolidates SFDA project data and associated documentation into a single system. The solution, which was built on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, supports fast information access and better business insight, and the solution will help SFDA speed up the inspection and registration life cycle.

Situation

The Saudi Food and Drug Authority (SFDA) was established under the Council of Ministers resolution no (1) dated 07/01/1424 H (corresponding to 10 March 2003G) as an independent corporate body that directly reports to the Premier. The Authority objective is to ensure the safety of food and drug for humans and animals and the safety of biological and chemical substances as well as electronic products used in the medical field.

The Saudi Food and Drug Authority (SFDA) was established under the Council of Ministers resolution no (1) dated 07/01/1424 H (corresponding to 10 March 2003G) as an independent corporate body that directly reports to the Premier. The Authority objective is to ensure the safety of food and drug for humans and animals and the safety of biological and chemical substances as well as electronic products used in the medical field.

Choosing a Solution

SFDA teamed up with Interactive Saudi Arabia and began using Microsoft® Office SharePoint Server 2007 as the foundation for a new solution, the Intranet Portal & Decision Support Environment (Al Bawaba). Al Bawaba enabled researchers and SFDA management to share information across research projects.

We’ve selected SharePoint technology for several reasons: it is quick to implement, we can build a custom application to run on top and it will provide opportunities for future growth.

Dr. Saad Al Kasabi , General Manager of Information Technology Sector , Saudi Food & Drug Authority (SFDA)

To extend the core functionality of SharePoint, Interactive Saudi Arabia development team built a Web application component using Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0 and Microsoft SQL Server™ 2005 Enterprise Edition database server.

The development team also used Microsoft Visual C#® 2005 development tool and Web forms to build forms-based Web pages and ASP.NET server controls to create and program common user interface elements.

Using Al Bawaba

Al Bawaba uses collaborative features such as team workspaces and data management files to help researchers manage their portfolio of projects. In addition, Al Bawaba contains food, drug and medical equipments companies’ information and scientific papers.

Currently, SFDA is moving most of its project documents into the new system and has around 10 executives and 200 employees and researchers using the system to help manage research, inspection and registration projects. In the near future, the SFDA expects to have as many as 2000 people using the system.

Benefits

Built on Microsoft products and technologies Al Bawaba is a “one-screen” solution that delivers scientific project background, data management fields and more to help SFDA achieve the most effective research projects and inspection management.

With Al Bawaba SFDA employees and researchers can more easily create, collect and discover project information and collaborate with one another regardless of location. At the same time, managers have the information they need to achieve faster, well-founded decisions. Overall, the Al Bawaba delivers the capabilities that SFDA needs to shorten research, inspection and registration cycles, compatible with good service.

Fast, Collaborative Access to Data

With Al Bawaba researchers have a central repository with all project information and documents and can connect with subject-matter experts regardless of their locations. They can share project documents, the SharePoint create new version of the document after every modification and all revisions are stored for the tractability of document development and history.

Better Business Insight

The ability to make quick, informed decisions is crucial in a health regulatory and inspection organization, this requires high quality data. Al Bawaba provides executives with immediate access to real-time project information.

Streamlined Research and Inspection Processes

With Al Bawaba and SharePoint technology SFDA researchers can find information faster and management can act on that information quickly.

Low-Cost Solution

As always, cost is a project constraint and with the implementation of a SharePoint technology solution SFDA achieved it’s goal of keeping costs low.

Conclusion

SFDA’s deployment of Office SharePoint Server 2007 demonstrates that it can serve enterprise Content management ECM and collaboration needs from the basic to the highly sophisticated. Continuing a longstanding and mutually beneficial relationship, SFDA partnered with Interactive Saudi Arabia for an intranet portal solution that could be customized and deployed rapidly, yet eventually scale to provide advanced ECM functions to hundreds of local and international users. SFDA found Office SharePoint Server 2007 easy to customize using the widely familiar .NET development environment. They also found it easy to install and manage. At the same time, Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides highly granular permission-based indexing and document control, advanced multilingual search capabilities and a host of other cutting-edge features, many of which SFDA plans to use in the future.