To address the company’s challenges and facilitate digital transformation, Marlabs implemented a series of strategic and innovative initiatives aimed at revolutionizing the company’s IT infrastructure and operations:

Developing a Global SAP Template

Since the mid-1990s, the life sciences corporation had acquired almost 30 companies, each with its legacy ERP, classification systems, taxonomies, and user interfaces. The employees spent countless hours integrating data, extracting reports, and attempting to get the systems to communicate with each other. Moreover, the company lacked an end-to-end view of its operations, which increased supply chain risks and concealed inefficiencies. Despite recognizing the need for a single global template for SAP, their previous internal efforts to create one had been unsuccessful.

Understanding the urgency of the situation, Marlabs immediately initiated a fast-track effort that launched a global template for 35 countries within six months. In addition, the team created 2,500 “read” screens and over 200 “write” screens, essentially standardizing the company’s SAP usage.

The innovation did not end there. Marlabs also elevated the corporation to S/4 HANA, providing them with a powerful new capability for building and deploying next-generation real-time applications and analytics. Furthermore, Marlabs developed a new UI that enabled “shop floor automation,” giving non-technical users simple, intuitive, automated methods to use SAP independently to track, plan, and respond to their business environment. Marlabs continues to augment the template and expand its usage while supporting global ERP operations with a team of over 60 specialist engineers.

Integrating Salesforce and SAP

The company’s extensive product line and intricate sales organization required a custom-built end-to-end integration between Salesforce and SAP. As a Salesforce Platinum Consulting Partner and a recognized SAP expert, Marlabs was well-equipped to create a solution that combined the two technologies seamlessly.

The sales personnel can now perform entries, queries, and reporting through an elegant, easy-to-use UX/UI. Marlabs replaced repetitive, error-prone manual sales and service processes with automated ones, providing the sales teams with a single source of truth for products, sales, leads, and conversions.

Implementing IoT in Laboratories

Since the corporation heavily depended on its R&D to make breakthroughs that could be crucial for future business prospects, Marlabs and the corporation envisioned bleeding-edged laboratories. First, they conceived a lab where all the equipment is connected to a centralized IoT platform, accessible via the web or mobile devices. They imagined a lab where materials ordering was completed automatically, where equipment maintenance depended on dynamic assessments of usage, performance, and the predicted likelihood of issues. Finally, they pictured a lab where continuous, automatic monitoring ensured the highest security and, most importantly, where scientists could focus on developing breakthrough solutions rather than managing administrative minutiae.

Marlabs developed a custom Life Sciences IoT Platform to turn this vision into a reality. This end-to-end solution included an analytics module, a user hub, a web app, a mobile app, and critical components of the device hub. This innovation truly brought the digital world into the laboratory.

Enhancing the Service Desk

Marlabs’ journey with the company’s service desk began in 2013 as a “typical” outsourced vendor. However, over time, the relationship evolved into much more. As the customer observed Marlabs consistently meeting their SLAs, maintaining a user rating of 9.0 out of 10, and retaining a stable, highly experienced delivery team, they requested Marlabs to handle more complex tickets and take on support for new functions, security problems, and SAP-related issues.

Ultimately, Marlabs developed an ITIL best-practices-based solution that streamlined and automated service processes and supported numerous left-shifts for service tickets, saving the customer $5 million over three years. In addition, the transition of the entire team and the ITIL-based solution to the customer occurred seamlessly, without disruptions.

Optimizing QA Testing

The life sciences company needed to conduct functional, regression, and performance testing on their 300,000+ product e-commerce site and their ERP SAP updates. In addition, testing was also required for every aspect of their Next-Generation IoT platforms, M2M data, E2E commerce platforms, and more. When Marlabs arrived on the scene, these activities overwhelmed the company’s testing capacity, creating a significant bottleneck. As a result, Marlabs brought in a QA team to address this issue and got to work.

The team’s first step was redesigning the testing process to eliminate unnecessary steps while enhancing test design and execution. They identified that regression testing consumed a massive amount of time, prompting them to launch a fast-track effort to automate it, resulting in 70%-time savings. Next, Marlabs implemented API-based capabilities, making testing easy, on-demand, and near-real-time. Over time, the focus expanded to include manual, automation, performance, and mobile testing. Today, the QA team handles testing through a process that tests more aspects and does so faster than ever before.