MARIJO VOLAREVIĆ*, DUBRAVKA SMOJVER** e-KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT AS A QUALITY TOOL * PLIVA Pharmaceuticals, IT dept. Prilaz B. Filipovića 25, HR-10000 Zagreb, CROATIA ** PLIVA Pharmaceuticals, QA dept. Prilaz B. Filipovića 25, HR-10000 Zagreb, CROATIA marijo.volarevic@pliva.hr, dubravka.smojver@pliva.hr ABSTRACT: Modern market environment and customer oriented business, a s well as constantly increasing amount of information exchanged and processed have resulted in shrinking response times, as well as reduced time-to-decision. In the same time, higher quality standards and regulatory requirements are putting additional pressure on day-to-day business. Advanced web-based Content Management technologies can provide us with a powerful tool for managing content across enterprise. That technology, incorporating and adopting some well known knowledge management tools and policies, makes knowledge management operative and widely used for the first time, thereby enabling us to sustain high quality decision making as well as high quality of our business processes and products. In this article some key techniques and constraints will be pointed out, and presented some high-end Content Management products available on the market. Own experience from pharmaceutical industry will be used as an example. KEYWORDS: knowledge management, electronic document management, web content management Introduction In a modern market, technology and globalization have caused intensive exchange of information, simultaneously shrinking time-to-market, thereby time-to-decision, within very short time periods. Information is now considered mission-critical. At the same time, quality standards, environmental and other regulatory requirements are so high that they are causing production of billions of documents. In Pharmaceutical industry, in particular, every procedure must be in details described and approved by Quality Assurance, every piece of data or results stored for possible future audits. For example, Drug master file for Bayer’s drug Cerivastatinâ consisted of 2.057.596 documents, and weighted 10 tons in paper version. Managing that quantity of paper effectively is practically impossible. Another problem is the share of knowledge within company. Knowledge is the most important competitive advantage in the modern market, but it is stored in heads, office desks, or files on personal computers [7]. Thereby it is a private, not the company asset as it should be. Demand for sharing knowledge, together with regulatory environment, legal suits and audits (financial or regulatory), are pushing toward transferring to an electronic document management system and the use of new technologies, such as Internet. These new Internet-based systems are widely known as Web Content Management (WCM) systems.