Charles River Laboratories is a research firm dedicated to providing products and services to expedite the discovery, early-stage development, and safe manufacture of new drugs and therapeutics to improve people’s lives. With over 100 facilities in over 20 countries, Charles River was no stranger to complex procedures that required coordination across large regions.
Are Outdated Procedures Holding You Back?
In particular, the Genetically Engineered Models and Services (GEMS) group at Charles River had been using a slow, manual business process for over 20 years. It involved the storage of large data sets on paper within high-density, offsite storage facilities.
Clearly, paper documentation for an organization the size of Charles River presented some challenges, including poor data access for customers and substantial coordination across eight unique sites and six different countries.
At a certain point, enough is enough – and Charles River chose to stamp out this inefficiency.
Modernizing Processes With OutSystems
Their answer was a new custom web and mobile application that would automate their business processes and provide immediate visibility to customers who needed access to data. Charles River chose OutSystems as its development platform due to the flexible nature of the system and its ability to build, test, deploy, and change versions quickly.
After a short five-month development period, Charles River launched Internet Colony Management (ICM™), a dynamic asset management solution that now handles the majority of GEMS’ business workflows.
The T4S Perspective: The Advantages of Updating Your Aging Legacy Workflows
Change isn’t easy for companies in the size and scale of Charles River, but once applied, the results are undeniable. Just look at what they accomplished through their new ICM portal:
- 150% increase in productivity
- 100% reduction in support labor
- 95% reduction of paper supplies and storage
We chalk these benefits up to the great development ecosystem that OutSystems provides. Readers know that we love OutSystems’ low-code development platform. Right out of the gate, it offers 50% faster application development timelines than traditional methods and supports simple compliance for app development that’s “baked in” to all applications from the very beginning. It’s hard to overstate just how important these foundational elements are to a lean, efficient development process.
And when you consider just how many new features a solution like this provides, it’s easy to see how Charles River achieved such impressive results:
- Real-time status updates among project management staff and customers
- Client portal to share information and direct colony requests
- Guided technician workflows to ensure accuracy
- Simple data export to Microsoft Excel
Questions to Ask for Your Own Digital Transformation Journey
Like Charles River, your company may be stuck in outdated legacy workflows that you know are holding you back, but for whatever reason, you haven’t been able to apply a solution. At T4S Partners, we recommend that you ask yourself the following questions:
- Are there specific processes that take up substantial amounts of employee labor or effort?
- How long has it been since you’ve taken a deep dive into these workflows and assessed whether better solutions might be feasible?
- Is your organization prepared to mature its digital strategy with new solutions that offer remedies to the aforementioned challenges?
If you’re struggling to answer any of these questions, contact us at T4S Partners. Our team loves to help businesses root out the source of inefficiencies and review how solutions like ours can offer a new way of working you may have not thought possible. Visit our site to learn more!
Link to story: https://www.outsystems.com/case-studies/internet-colony-management/