Abstract

In 2005, Pfizer, Inc. (Pfizer) was faced with a financial crisis with many of its leading drugs nearing patent expiry. The company announced cost-cutting initiatives including a reduction of its annual budget by US$4 billion. However, the company realized that cost-cutting measures alone wouldn’t suffice. To ensure that Pfizer once again moved to a strong position, it had to adopt a strategy to leverage its human capital in an efficient manner. On analyzing the activities of the employees, Jordan Cohen (Cohen), who is now the head of PfizerWorks program, found that instead of focusing on high-value work for which they were recruited, spent a disproportionate amount of their time on mundane tasks such as data entry, researching, creating documents, working with PowerPoint, etc. This led Cohen to start the PfizerWorks program (initially called ‘Office Of The Future’) in early 2008 after months of testing the initiative with some employees. It involved outsourcing the time wasting tasks to two Indian-based business process outsourcing (BPO) firms. The program was well received by employees of Pfizer and was appreciated by industry observers, However, some industry observers were not happy about the initiative as they felt that instead of outsourcing these tasks to other countries, these should be outsourced to companies or people in the US. According to Cohen, the PfizerWorks program had helped increase productivity of its employees and these highly-paid employees of Pfizer were now able to better focus their time and attention on more strategic aspects of their work rather than waste precious time and effort on more mundane tasks. As of mid-2009, Cohen was also exploring ways to make the program more effective.

Learning Objectives

The case is structured to achieve the following Learning Objectives:

• Understand how the workplace has changed in the 21st century and understand how organizations are trying to get the best out of their employees in the new milieu
• Understand how organizations are trying to improve the productivity of its employees
• Understand how job and task analysis could help companies adopt a strategy to leverage its human capital in an efficient manner
• Understand the differences between productive tasks and reproductive tasks and how this knowledge can be used to improve employee productivity
• Understand the issues and challenges related to outsourcing and off shoring and understand how organizations are using these innovatively

Keywords

Organizational effectiveness, Outsourcing, Outsourcing model, employee productivity, employee efficiency, Job analysis, task analysis, productive tasks, reproductive tasks, human capital, job design, cost-cutting, pilot project, collaboration, PfizerWorks, 'Office Of The Future', off shoring, knowledge process outsourcing, Business Process Outsourcing, Pfizer