PleaseTech
Collaborative Process to Reduce Review Cycles

As the economy continues to grow, so do the number of available jobs. This means that retaining talented employees becomes that much harder as companies seek to recruit a top quality workforce. Providing people with the right tools to do their job has never been so important, and this is especially pertinent in an era of increasing regulation, where employees are managing and reviewing more documents than ever before.

An expert in document and content management technologies, David Cornwell is the founder and CEO of PleaseTech Ltd, which specializes in document review and co-authoring software. ‘People underestimate the complexity behind document review. Ten years ago, whilst the bigger document management systems were providing check-in, check-out capabilities and approval workflows, they didn’t address the review process very well and there was the demand for controlled collaborative review processes. Email is one of the most highly used tools for getting a team to review a document, but it causes cumbersome email trails, messed up documents, duplicated and conflicting comments. This can result in lots of meetings, conference calls and late nights to pull everyone’s changes together. Now imagine that problem across geographies and time zones, or with multiple and lengthy documents to review with 25 people involved in the process.

“To alleviate these issues, we sat down to design the perfect document review and coauthoring software product” reminisces Cornwell, “we reasoned that, since document review is such a critical business process, there had to be a market for such a tool”. The result is PleaseReview - a revolutionary and unique offering in the collaborative review and co-authoring of documents, where people can mark up the document but not clutter it or overwrite others’ changes.

“Our solutions provide the collaboration where everybody can see each other’s comments and changes ensuring a transparent process,” assures Cornwell. Designed for use either as a standalone or integrated review solution, PleaseReview supports Microsoft Office suite, PDF, source code, text and images.

It provides review management and control, change consolidation, comment reconciliation, comment threads and audit trails. The solution can even assist in locking down a document, make it read only, or open up a particular area into a co-authoring zone where access can be assigned to another contributor for co-authoring.“It offers a very high degree of granular control throughout the review process,” explains Cornwell. PleaseReview facilitates simultaneous, parallel and offline review by multiple participants, wherever they are, by displaying the document in a browser-based environment. In the life sciences industry, in particular, reviews can be complex. For example, in a particular life science company, a document has an average of 175 comments per review.

PleaseReview offers a very high degree of granular control throughout the review process

“In a scenario where a document is evaluated by 10 reviewers, imagine the laborious process of copying and pasting 175 comments, and emailing all the documents back and forth between reviewers. We’re saving 50 percent or more in the document preparation time by managing this,” says Cornwell. For instance, Pearl Therapeutics (Pearl), an AstraZeneca group company, conducts collaborative reviews for various regulatory and clinical documents. In 2013, Pearl selected PleaseReview as the solution to their collaborative review problem. “We have been able to almost eliminate the amount of time authors spend collating comments into the next version and are now far more efficient about resolution of conflicting reviewer comments,” says Matt Fitzpatrick, Manager Regulatory Affairs.

With over 100,000 satisfied users, Cornwell has further challenged the team to deliver an even better review experience. “We are aiming for a ‘usability’ release at the end of the year, so are critically examining all the features of the software to make it more intuitive. The idea is to evolve the user experience so that anyone familiar with standard consumer technologies and web applications will feel immediately ‘at home’ in PleaseReview.”