The company had grown rapidly and whilst it is excellent at providing high-quality products as well as outstanding technical support, it was traditional in how it operated and as a result the use of technical and digital assets for its logistics was low. The business did have an off-the-shelf software platform to run the accounts but did not have the systems in place to manage their increasingly rapid growth and subsequent laboratory production.
In order to transform its current processes, the business was keen to explore how a software solution could assist in the customer journey, laboratory activities as well as stock control.
From the initial brief, it was agreed that the business needed some technical consultancy. There were many complex processes and a vast number of different ‘entities’ within the business that needed to be understood before recommendations on software solutions could be offered.
Initially, Sapere provided 5 days of consultancy to perform an IT audit, we then provided analysis of the current processes and proposed potential solutions to increase efficiencies within the business. From the resulting reportprovided as part of the audit, Sapere was able to recommend a bespoke CRM solution that would work for the business.
The CRM software was built around the company’s unique business processes, existing spreadsheets and SQL databases. Because of the complexity of the business an off-the-shelf solution would not have given the efficiencies Absolute Antibody needed to manage their rapid growth.
The solution, although mostly a bespoke web app, is designed to utilise third party solutions and can be integrated with other platforms such as accountancy packages. This is so the business has one platform to manage the end-to-end processing of an order, it’s processing, it’s shipping, and any customer aftercare. By taking advantage of the flexibility of a bespoke solution the business can adopt new ways of working to further enhance the efficiencies software can bring.
This was a complex solution and the project illustrates an often avoidable situation many businesses find themselves in because of spreadsheet reliance. Spreadsheets are an easy way to capture, share, manipulate and report on large data sets but they aren’t very good at delivering business workflows. However, workflows don’t tend to be fully defined until these spreadsheets are put in place and used – a classic ‘chicken and egg’ situation.
This project is an excellent example of taking an extremely complex set of spreadsheets, workflows, and other data sources and creating a bespoke solution with better workflow, greater automation, and massively increased security and efficiencies for the business.
The following business benefits have been realised since the web app was developed.