2020 began in uncertainty, but we are immensely proud to have reacted faster than industry, banning travel on January 31st, closing our offices on February 25th, and establishing a Covid Management Team on March 5th, despite a raised eyebrow here and there at the time. This gave us time to prepare and transition to a fully WFH business, and I like to believe it stands as a shining example of how we protect our staff and customers beyond the norm.
For some of us, that transition was non-existent, for some it was a challenge to adapt, but overall, our staff are happier and even more productive – I can say confidently we will not return to a 9-6 office paradigm, instead developing exciting new full-time spaces that will be used part-time for our staff to meet and work collaboratively on an ad-hoc basis with no fixed schedule or commitment. We will exit this pandemic as carefully as we entered it, ensuring that the remnants of 20th century work paradigm remain rightfully retired in 2019. Stay tuned for an update on how we have designed this new world in 2021.
However, as we say goodbye and good riddance to 2020, I wanted to focus on the many great achievements of the outstanding work that our team, customers, and partners have done this year!
First and foremost, a thanks to our customers on the fight against COVID:
Two of the three COVID-19 vaccinations to hit the market have the regulatory submissions documents managed in CARA (AstraZeneca and Pfizer) – and overall, more than 250,000 users of CARA are working on vaccinations or treatments.
Our customer and partner base has:
Increased in global licensed user base to just over 550,000.
Moved or started to move to the CARA Cloud – including 2 major Quality systems of 50,000+ users each.
Grown to include many more partners including exciting developments with Google, Fonto, fme and Cognizant among others.
Generis also grew a lot as a company. During 2020 we:
Opened offices in Japan and Germany (and then sent staff back to work from home!)
Grew our staff by 35% (including our first salespeople in 20 years of operating)
Increased both our top and bottom line
We also featured very positively in the GENS & Associates 2020 RIM survey (top 5 in customer satisfaction, above industry average in innovation and below average in decline) – rising in ranking to #2 for Regulatory Submission Document Management among large pharma.
Best of all, we launched the CARA Life Science Platform and the CARA Enterprise Workspace, based on the new CARA as a SaaS offering, and have tenants already moved in and doing their business-critical work there.
As the weathered but happy faces of Generis take a breath at the end of this year, we look forward to working with all customers and partners during 2021, transforming our work and theirs in what is already forecast as our most successful year in Generis history. Most of all we wish you a safe, healthy, and relaxing time. Now I must prepare for our annual Christmas party – the most important virtual event yet!
– James Kelleher [/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]