Bsbcus501a manage quality customer service assessment

Operational Excellence. Our goal is to consistently deliver outstanding service to our clients on a global scale through our platform focused on people, process and clients. As a scientific services company, people are integral to our success. We work to recruit, develop and retain talented people through our "Compelling Offer" program which is designed to provide and encourage highly qualified people to initiate and build a career at Covance. We aim to enhance the effectiveness of these people with superior processes to efficiently deliver a high level of client service. We use Six Sigma and other proven improvement methodologies to optimize our processes to increase our cost competitiveness, eliminate variability in our client service levels and build competitive advantage. Finally, we seek to leverage consistent outstanding client service by building strategic relationships with our clients that drive growth and help sustain our competitive advantage. Across our people, process and clients platform, we seek to utilize technology to augment the talent of our people, to automate robust processes, and to link us more closely to our clients via proprietary systems such as StudyTracker®, LabLink and Trial Tracker®.

Global Reach. We believe that it is important to provide a broad range of drug research and development services on a global basis. We have offices, regional monitoring sites and laboratories in over 50 locations in more than 30 different countries and conduct field work in many other countries. We believe we are a leader among drug development services companies in our ability to support large, global clinical trial programs.

Acquisitions. In addition to organic development of services, we consider acquisitions that are complementary to our existing services and that expand our ability to serve our clients. While we cannot exclude the possibility that we may opportunistically seek to take advantage of other situations, we generally expect acquisitions to enhance our existing services either qualitatively or geographically or to add new services that can be integrated with our existing services. In 2010, Covance acquired sanofi-aventis' preclinical facilities in Porcheville, France and Alnwick, United Kingdom including its CMC (Chemistry, Manufacturing and Controls) services. In 2009, we purchased Swiss Pharma Contract Ltd., a 50 bed clinical pharmacology company located in Basel, Switzerland as well as Merck's gene expression laboratory in Seattle, Washington. In 2008, we acquired Lilly's 450 acre early development campus in Greenfield, Indiana and we enhanced our biomarker service offerings by purchasing a minority stake in Caprion Proteomics, a leading provider of proteomics-based services to the pharmaceutical industry.

Services

The services we provide constitute two segments for financial reporting purposes: (1) early development services, which includes discovery support services, preclinical services and clinical pharmacology services, and (2) late-stage development services, which includes central laboratory, clinical development, and commercialization services (periapproval and market access service). Although each segment has separate services within it, they can be and increasingly are combined in integrated service offerings.

Early Development

Preclinical Services

Our preclinical services include toxicology services, pharmaceutical chemistry, nutritional chemistry and related services. Our preclinical area has been a source of innovation by introducing new technologies for client access to data such as StudyTracker®, electronic animal identification, multimedia study reports and animal and test tube measures of induced cell proliferation or reproduction. StudyTracker® is an internet-based client access product which allows clients of toxicology, bioanalytical, metabolism and reproductive and developmental toxicology services to review study data and schedules on a near real-time basis. We have laboratories in locations which include Madison, Wisconsin; Chandler, Arizona, Greenfield, Indiana and Vienna, Virginia in the United States and Harrogate, United Kingdom, Alnwick, United Kingdom, Muenster,