DuPont and CSC Leverage Expertise, Teamwork to Deploy Crop Protection Data Warehouse

As the world's population continues to grow, protecting the precious food supply from destructive fungus, insects, and weeds is more important than ever. Working closely with DuPont's Crop Protection Discovery unit, CSC designed and implemented an information management system that successfully integrates millions of research data points, helping essential crop protection products reach the market faster.

The project, known as Discovery Data Warehouse, has been named one of six winners of the 2002 CSC Award for Technical Excellence. The annual awards, which are part of CSC's Leading Edge Forum initiative, recognize projects and business processes that use innovative technology solutions to produce dramatic business results for CSC clients.

Using advanced technology to help protect the food supply

Based in Newark, Del. and with offices in more than 40 countries, DuPont's Crop Protection operation serves the agriculture industry by offering an extensive range of products for the grain and specialty crop sectors. The group develops, tests and manufactures more than 50 brands of herbicides, fungicides, and insecticides, such as DuPont Escort, a herbicide used to control noxious weeds.

Before the project started, DuPont possessed an immense array of raw information that was widely scattered across scientific disciplines. For example, there were separate databases for chemical compounds and environmental data.

In the crop protection business, during the discovery process -- when compounds are screened and identified as good candidates for product development -- a chief goal is to efficiently merge these massive amounts of data and provide users with an integrated flow of information.

"The applications they were using were segregated and didn't integrate well with one another. Researchers needed to access the various applications to gather information for decision making -- and DuPont wanted to bring it all together in one spot," explains CSC's Greg Gaal, who oversaw the data population aspects of the project.

Gaal describes the partnership as the perfect marriage of DuPont's scientific expertise with CSC's technical know-how. "We held many meetings with DuPont scientists and used their expertise in biology and chemistry to help us understand the data they required for decision making -- and they relied on us for the implementation."

Walt Mullikin, a CSC partner and the system architect for the Discovery Data Warehouse says, "DuPont came in and said 'This is what we do as scientists -- help us out.' We brought in our technology expertise and it developed into just a fantastic relationship -- an awesome partnership."

Discovery project sets a technical milestone

In general, data warehouses serve as a collection of transaction data from disparate sources that can be structured for querying, analysis and reporting. Raw data serves as the lifeblood of any enterprise focused on research and development and DuPont scientists are continually on the lookout for just the right mix of chemical compounds that will be effective in killing off bad bugs, weeds, and fungus, without harming the environment.

DuPont's Jo Cotterman, who served as project manager for the implementation, says, "We did a lot of exploration to find what the best fit was and to come up with a cutting-edge solution that met our needs. We had the responsibility of applying the solution to R&D."

One of the major technical challenges of the project was to integrate a commercially available relational online analytical processing (ROLAP) engine for chemical and biological inquiries with DuPont's custom application components. The result was an information system that is believed to be the first significant R&D data warehouse implementation that integrates data from a broad range of scientific disciplines.

Close collaboration and communication serve as keys to success

The close business partnership between DuPont and CSC, along with the clear lines of communication that were established, contributed to the success of the project.

"What the partnership did was unleash a huge amount of creativity," says Cotterman. "Through teamwork, innovation, and creativity, we were able to create a solution that was seamless."

"The communication was fantastic. There was a lot of cooperation and synergy going on," Cotterman says. "People from DuPont felt very free to come and talk to people on the project team and the team was good at incorporating their feedback. We were actually making changes based on what they were suggesting."

Mullikin adds, "The key is that we created an environment in which DuPont's scientists and CSC's technical people could collaborate."

Leveraging technology to enhance business value

Gaal summarizes the impact the Discovery Data Warehouse had on R&D at DuPont, "In a nutshell, the data warehouse enables researchers to identify hits and leads more quickly, rapidly eliminate compounds not likely to become products, and allows for cost savings through efficient data integration and standardization. One of the keys to the success of the data warehouse is its ability to allow researchers to obtain answers to questions they could not address previously."

The ultimate goal of the project was to greatly reduce the amount of time it takes for a chemical compound to go from discovery into development. As an example of the new efficiencies created, Gaal points out, "The data warehouse gives people a huge amount of flexibility to filter data and drill down and find what they want instead of having to print hard copy reports."

DuPont's Cotterman praises the project as a huge success. "The feedback is spectacular. I've never seen such positive reaction -- people stop me in the hallway and say 'Love that data warehouse.'"

"We couldn't have done this without each other," says Mullikin. "DuPont's culture and CSC's culture really blend nicely. They all want to deliver quality, just like we do."

About the Leading Edge Forum and the Award for Technical Excellence

CSC's Leading Edge Forum serves as the focal point for stimulating technology thought leadership, innovation and collaboration among CSC, our clients and our alliance partners. The annual CSC Award for Technical Excellence is the highest recognition for technical performance at CSC.

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