Background
A global pharmaceutical leader known for its innovation in vaccines, biologics, and prescription medicines faced a growing challenge in managing one of its most valuable assets—product trademarks. With thousands of name candidates in play across dozens of markets, the company’s global trademark team was still relying on Excel spreadsheets and paper-based tracking. The result? Fragmented data, inconsistent processes, and limited visibility into the status of trademark candidates across the organization.
At a Glance
What Mattered Most
Transform a the paper and Excel based trademark tracking process into a unified digital platform that enables global visibility, milestone-based decision-making, and strategic control.
What We Noticed
The team had a fluid process and lacked a collaborative tool. Prior tooling efforts relied on fragmented, one-off solutions that served individuals—resulting in siloed repositories, variations of the workflow, and limited visibility. Knowledge sharing was constrained by file access and the inability to aggregate data.
What Changed
"What's Possible" workshops conducted
Lifecycle established
deployed and
adopted
loaded, updated,
and monitored
to track campaign &
candidate status
Challenge
Despite the strategic importance of trademarks in the pharmaceutical industry, the company’s process for tracking and managing name candidates was fragmented and outdated. Excel sheets varied by user, lacked consistency, and couldn’t support global collaboration. There was no way to track milestones, filter by review activity, or generate meaningful reports. A prior attempt to digitize the process had failed to deliver results. Leadership needed a solution that could bring order to the structure— and fast.
Solution
- Reviewed client’s needs and project progress
- Developed and approved a new feature roadmap and timeline
- Applied an agile approach with Minimum Viable Products and multiple releases to get the users familiar with the new systems, engaged, and reduce resistance
- Reviewed and analyzed artifacts and conducted workshops to document the process
- Cleansed and standardized the status of thousands of name candidates across the global teams
- Migrated data into SharePoint with metadata to enable filtering, tracking, and reporting
- Developed Excel-based reports and dashboards to visualize candidate status and progress
- Led Change efforts by training the team, conducting workshops, and providing support
Outcome
The transformation gave the trademark team a centralized, end-to-end view of all active name candidates. What was once fragmented, manual process became a structured, digital system that improved collaboration, reduced risk, and accelerated decision-making.
- Unified digital system enabled global visibility and lifecycle management of trademark candidates
- Standardized tracking across teams, reducing duplication and improving collaboration
- Milestone-based reporting and KPI dashboards supported faster, data-driven decisions
- Real-time insight into trademark candidate progress and bottlenecks
- Reduced risk of missed deadlines and regulatory missteps through structured lifecycle tracking
- Improved transparency and efficiency across legal, marketing, and regulatory functions
Conclusion
This engagement transformed a critical launch process from being unorganized, slow, and burdensome to structured and efficient with digital clarity. Standardization and real-time tracking enabled the organization to gain control over its global trademark pipeline — reducing the management effort to identify, research, and trademark a product name.
