With revenues at $3.6 billion, Life Technologies, a global biotechnology tools company providing cutting edge systems, consumables, and services for scientific researchers across the world, had a clear roadmap of empowering its field sales force with timely and intelligent customer insights to sell more, sell better.

For this, the company required a business intelligence solution that supports a variety of smartphone devices including the Blackberry and the iPhone - enabling its sales personnel to take timely decisions shortening the decision making cycle. As a result, the company thought of deploying IBM-Cognos for Blackberry devices and ‘Roambi’ a data visualisation application from MeLLmo Inc. for the iPhones. The company today boasts of tremendous incremental improvement in sales force productivity and shortened the sales cycle.

The Challenge
Serving nearly 75,000 customers around the world, Life Technologies is pioneering scientific research in areas such as academic research, drug discovery and development, toxicology and forensics, disease diagnostics, clinical cell therapy and regenerative medicine, and biologics manufacturing with the help of its cutting-edge scientific tools.

It is quite a challenge to support the field sales force with adequate data that helps them reduce the decision support cycle and increase productivity at the same time. “To make this a reality, it was essential to have an automated and responsive system which can help the sales representative in accessing critical customer information on the go,” says Manoj Prasad, Vice President Enterprise Architecture, Global Applications and Testing, Life Technologies.

“While all this was aimed at boosting employee productivity and increasing their efficiency, in the long run, the aim was to improve customer satisfaction by leaps and bounds.”

Both the executive management team and the field sales force required daily sales reports that could give the status of sales, planning and forecasting. There was also a need felt to provide inventory reports so that the sales force can make realistic promises to their customers.

But this wasn’t so easy. There were a bunch of barriers to be overcome before moving further. One, there wasn’t a single technology platform/application that could push data to all types of smart phones and mobile devices. And in Life Technologies, there were nearly 2,500 Blackberry users and 800 iPhone users. The second biggest challenge was to integrate the two with the data warehouse. “We did not have the luxury of time to wait for such an application to develop,” Prasad says. “Mobile BI was the strategic priority for our department in 2010.” Life Technologies’ goal was to roll out mobile applications that would allow its field sales force to deep dive into the data on the cutting-edge tools it was developing, to take to the researchers who needed those tools.

MANOJ PRASAD, Vice President Enterprise Architecture, Life Technologies.

The Solution
Anticipating the frustrations that would spew from the non-availability of an app, Prasad's technology and application development teams didn’t wait for one.

“We knew that enterprises like us had already started going mobile,” he said, spurred on by improvements in the ability of smartphones to display graphical information and the emergence of intuitive graphical interfaces that can better handle BI visualisations.

Delivering these benefits to employees was obviously appealing. “That’s the reason why the user demand pushed for the Mobile BI as the top priority for implementation,” he said.

In their quest to overcome the bottlenecks of the technologies available and the inherent inability of those technologies to work on the popular smartphones, Prasad and his architecture team looked for different options to get data from SAP Business Objects and IBM Cognos BI systems onto employees’ Blackberries and iPhones – the two most popular devices used in Life Technologies.

“At this point, we were really at the crossroads. On the one hand, we were committed to deploying a Mobile BI solution in the stipulated timeframe and on the other, there was no one single vendor/technology that could work seamlessly on the different devices used by the employees,” says Prasad.

After much evaluation, the team came up with a unique proposition. They selected MeLLmo Inc. Roambi, a data-visualisation application that takes BI data from various available sources and makes it iPhone friendly.

Unfortunately, Roambi doesn’t support the Blackberry. IBM Cognos V8.4 was used to push the data to Blackberry users. Prasad then asked his team to use Roambi to develop two reports - sales quotas and daily sales reports - that are important to company’s sales force. As a pilot, a test version of daily sales reports taken from Life Technologies' Cognos data warehouse was rolled out to nearly 50 sales professionals who used iPhones. “This worked well. But there was another problem now. A majority of our users have Blackberry and Roambi doesn't work on it. So we planned to use the mobile version of Cognos to deliver similar reports to the Blackberry users,” says Prasad.

"After having tested the applications multiple times in various environments, I showed it to the CIO and a few customers. They all got very excited."

The Outcome
As a company, Life Technologies is very focused on customer experience and satisfaction. From 2009 the company’s prime focus has been on how to work with the customers closely in the best possible way.

Before this deployment, the sales force didn’t have the right data on time to service their customers. The customers weren’t very satisfied with the quality of service delivered to them. “How can you expect the sales force to sell more when the customers are not happy with the services provided to them today,” questions Prasad.

The deployment wasn’t easy but after going through the rigour, the company has certainly experienced a sea change in the productivity and efficiency of its sales force. “We have an edge over our competitors. Now our sales force reaches out to the customers well informed and in time,” says Prasad.

Today, even the service engineers are also empowered using the mobile BI. They have all the required data to service the equipment efficiently.

The Mobile BI provided between 30-60 minutes of saving per sales representative per day. “There are nearly 1000 sales representatives in Life Technologies. This adds to 1,000 hours of saving. These 1,000 hours can be used for selling more products,” says Prasad.

Prasad’s team is already working on applications for other parts of the company, such as a global warehouse report, and has set up a mobile development architecture team to devise an entire mobile strategy for Life Technologies, with a particular emphasis on BI.

—Rahul Neel Mani
(This case study was done through a telephonic conversation.)