A global life sciences company partnered with Wizeline to reimagine and modernize a core client experience. Discovery that began three weeks early did more than credential our ability to deliver: it earned our team a closer role in the client’s ongoing transformation strategy.
AT A GLANCE
- Client: A global life sciences tools and services provider serving pharmaceutical companies, biotech firms and research universities with custom automated sample stores priced in the $millions.
- Challenge: Modernize the core revenue driving quote-to-order experience across several business units (and an FDA-regulated operation) where much of the prior process ran on spreadsheets, email and manual data entry.
- Wizeline offering: Product and technical discovery with internal and external stakeholders, product engineering and platform modernization, run as one program under shared technical and delivery leadership with embedded strategic consulting.
- Highlights
- 4 to 5 weeks down to 1 day: target quote turnaround for a custom storage system
- $500,000 to $1 million+: the cost of one configuration error the new rules engine is designed to prevent
- 50 to 60 percent: projected reduction in customer care workload from automated order status
- 4 initiatives mapped to one value stream and built on one shared design system
A HIGHLY REGULATED ORGANIZATION WITH MANY BUSINESS UNITS ASKED WIZELINE TO CHALLENGE ITS CORE REVENUE PROCESSES
Our client does complicated life science work that drives modern medicine.
They build and supply cryogenic sample storage, automated biorepositories and genomic sequencing and synthesis services to pharmaceutical companies, biotech firms and research universities.
Every sale is B2B and most begin with an email or phone call. Getting to an actually delivered order meant crossing several business units, a Salesforce instance, Oracle back office and manufacturing operations subject to the FDA’s Quality System Regulation.
Due to complexity, much of that fulfillment process ran on Excel sheets, Word docs and human handoffs.
Miguel Mora, technical head of Wizeline’s engagement with this client, says he sees this all of the time in complex production chains. “The client arrived with four somewhat-defined initiatives and a broader request. Leadership wanted more than engineering work. They asked Wizeline to review how the company worked while delivering the project’s scope, and to avoid rebuilding the current process with just new software. We needed to identify not yet uncovered truths about the process, fail points and stakeholder wishes to rethink the experience itself”
«That is the challenge that really I love,» Miguel says. «It’s when the customer tells us, ‘I have a problem.'»
ONE VALUE STREAM, FOUR INITIATIVES
Build the New Design System (foundation). Tokens, components and UX standards shared across every customer-facing surface. Complete and in use by the other three initiatives.
Create a 3D configurator (quote). A guided sales tool and rules engine for quoting custom automated sample stores more efficiently and predictably.
B2B e-commerce (order and status). The company’s first online ordering channel, with Shopify as the order management engine and integrations to Salesforce and back-office systems.
Gene synthesis platform (order and processing). A move from .NET Framework 4.8 and Vue.js to .NET 8, with a new architecture and a React front end, addressing reliability, observability and performance in the genomics business.
UNCOMMON PRE-WORK FOR DISCOVERY GAVE THE TEAM A WORKING MAP OF A COMPLEX ORGANIZATION, TO WALK IN WITH OPINION
The original plan called for four weeks of discovery: two on site with the client’s directors, then two to process those findings within the Wizeline teams and present back a plan.
Getting directors from several business units into one location proved harder than expected and the kickoff was moved back by weeks, repeatedly. With a team already staffed, we had to choose between waiting and starting remotely.
So we got proactive. The team started remotely and used the three weeks to map who owned which part of the value stream and engage directly. It ran online sessions with each business unit, beginning with directors and their goals for each initiative, which became the program’s KPIs. Each director named more direct reports worth talking to, and the conversations widened to sales, customer care, IT and infrastructure.
The research also reached outside the company.
The client arranged interviews with select top customers and the team reviewed competitor websites and buying experiences with those clients to find meaningful inspiration. Analysis of the existing systems also surfaced ADA accessibility gaps and caching problems.
By the live kick off date, the team had a well-informed draft picture of the organization and an agenda built around its gaps.
The team identified the prep work as key to this engagement’s early (and lasting) trust:. «You should not start with an in-person workshop as the first job to do when kicking off with a client,» Miguel says. «We come in prepared and ready so that we collectively feel we know the client, before the in-person time.»
THE INITIAL DISCOVERY’S BLUEPRINT TRACED THE REAL VALUE STREAM FROM SALES CALL TO ORDER SHIPPED
The workshops ran at two sites: one in the UK for the e-commerce and configurator initiatives and one on the US East Coast for the genomics business. Wizeline teams were readily available to facilitate both.
Each paired product discovery, which defined what was being built or modernized, with technical discovery, which mapped processes, data flows and architecture under regulatory constraints. Critically, the technical leads who would run delivery attended every session, including the product-focused ones, so they heard the pain points first-hand.
The questions went deep enough that client staff sometimes asked why they mattered.
Our answer reminded all to stay with the desired outcome: We needed more than a delivery plan, we needed to ground work in a blueprint that traced orders through every system, input and manual intervention point and marked the parts of the flow the new systems would change. The customer complaints, the seller frictions, etc.
The client’s reaction, as Miguel recalls, was direct: «Your team is totally different. You were so organized, you were asking questions that we never got asked before.»
The blueprint exposed customer care processes worth completely reimagining, to fix. A salesperson who closed a deal in Salesforce could press a button to create the order, but the button generated an email and a line in an Excel file. A seven-person customer care team then keyed each order into Oracle by hand and called the customer to confirm shipping. The same team fielded more than 100 calls and emails a day from customers asking where their orders were.
The e-commerce build addresses that stretch of the value stream.
Orders flow through Shopify and customers receive an automatic notification whenever an order ships, partially ships, or gets a label, along with a dashboard of their orders and status. Our team expects the change to reduce the full customer care workload by 50 to 60 percent and return the team to the issues that need a person.
QUOTING A CUSTOM LIFE SCIENCES PRODUCT IS THE HIGHEST-STAKES STEP IN THE VALUE STREAM
Alongside standard cryogenic freezers with fixed capacities, the company builds custom automated stores for pharmaceutical companies and research universities.
The largest is the size of a two-story house and stores up to 300,000 samples. That storage is more than shelving, these products include robotic retrieval, imaging and inventory management. Each custom “store” is priced between $5 million and $15 million, or more.
That production quote depends on answers the sales team has not always thought to ask and that traditionally may also have come in many customer-driven forms. Ceiling clearance is one such need-to-know: safety rules require about a meter of room above the store. Temperature, humidity and where the store will be located are others. When a question like this was missed, fixing came after the design was committed, at a cost of $500,000 to $1 million to rebuild or adjust the plan depending on how far along the work was. Producing a quote took four to five weeks.
Wizeline’s configurator standardizes the question set around those past mistakes within an intuitive UX/UI, so every salesperson asks every customer the same questions. Behind the questions is a rules engine built from pricing books, pricing rules and engineering rules collected from the engineers who build the stores.
Much of that knowledge previously existed only in those engineers’ heads. The engine suggests configurations and produces a price close to what the build will legitimately require.
4 TO 5 WEEKS → 1 DAY
Target time to produce a quote for a custom automated storage system once the configurator is in production.
CLEAR OPTIONS AND EARLY WARNINGS KEEP WIZELINE IN THE STRATEGY CONVERSATION (LITERALLY ACROSS THE TABLE)
Discovery gained us the advisory role and great delivery habits have kept us in that seat as the program has grown. When the client changes direction, the team first checks whether the change is needed, then lays out how it can fit: within the schedule, with a delayed release, or by moving people between projects. We give honest, informed, but quick guidance – always.
The client has called the approach clever and transparent and has noticed that the answer is rarely just a larger invoice.
«We always have a plan A, plan B, plan C to try to help them to accomplish the goal, with a preference and a why.»
Risk gets the same treatment.
The team’s standard is to raise a hand as soon as a problem appears, including one that will not surface for six weeks. There are specific ceremonies for this:
- Day-to-day teams run daily reviews and weekly updates.
- Executives receive one slide per project each week covering schedule status by color, risks, accomplishments, help needed from the client and goals for the next two weeks.
And as a cultural point of purpose, the team keeps challenging the process as delivery continues. In one case it found a client group spending 60 percent of its time updating a spreadsheet because the system of record lacked the data they needed, so we proposed moving that data into the new system. Findings like that have given the team traction with the client’s CTO, who now hears process recommendations alongside delivery status.
The program structure makes this possible across four initiatives at once. Our Technical head and Delivery head on the project work together as a single paired “unit”, operating with transparency on finance, staffing and technical decisions, so neither works from partial information.
Project managers report to the Delivery head with a dotted line to the Technical head on risks, and a senior Wizeline solutions architect set the architecture during the first three months.
The team’s leaders interviewed and selected each technical lead, each of whom leads seven to ten engineers and they’re placed in their role exactly because of their ability to be vocal and opinionated with the client. As Miguel put it, «I recall early on we’d say ‘this is your time. The client will recognize each of you as the leader of the development, not just me.»
COMFORT IN COMPLEXITY STARTS WITH DISCOVERY DONE EARLY AND IN THE ROOM
Established enterprises in regulated or complex industries often run critical work through spreadsheets, tribal processes and email because workarounds and ad hoc steps provided at-one-point necessary flexibility. As business and value streams scale, though, so do the risks and failure points of chaotic systems. That hurts the bottom line, and blocks future value.
If your organization is modernizing a core value stream, we’d love to talk.
Wizeline designs and builds production agentic AI for enterprises, with Claude and AWS at the core. For more on how media companies are putting agents to work, see How agentic AI is redefining media workflows and wizeline’s media and entertainment practice.
