Case Study
UST helped global industrial testing firm modernize legacy lab systems, increased productivity 50% and NPS 30%
OUR CLIENT
Founded more than a decade ago, this global industrial testing company provides certification services for a wide range of market sectors, including healthcare, building materials and transportation. After a series of mergers and acquisitions (M&A), the company has become an industry powerhouse valued at more than $5 billion.
THE CHALLENGE
Complex LIMS environment was fraught with inefficiencies, risks, and high costs
After a series of acquisitions, the company relied on highly fragmented, disjointed LIMs to operate its 248 labs. With at least 48 different LIMS applications in use across the organization, company leaders struggled with governance challenges, siloed data, scalability issues, high operational costs, systemic inefficiencies, less than optimal productivity and diminished customer satisfaction. These issues negatively impacted testing and certification throughput, market responsiveness and its net promoter score (NPS). The company wanted to engage with a leading technology partner to consolidate and align the applications to improve scalability, reduce risks and enhance customer experiences.
THE TRANSFORMATION
High-fidelity roadmap consolidated and modernized systems and processes to create a scalable, future-proof architecture
Combining human-centered design with technology innovations, UST Evolve Design assessed the LIMS in each line of business and created “value pools” of similar LIMS based on transformational readiness using a matrix of revenue opportunities, potential cost improvements, scalability and existing technology stack. From there, a lab with the highest concentration of LIMS tagged for replacement and a high degree of pain points was selected for a pilot consolidation project. Following the initial project's success, UST Evolve Design embarked on a larger work effort to strategically reduce the company's LIMS by:
- Performing additional discovery to fully understand the LIMS ecosystem—using actor and activity mapping exercises to refine the scope of the proof of concept
- Conducting a current-state assessment—by analyzing the existing LIMS landscape, lab workflows, data integrations and user requirements across regions to surface pain points and opportunities
- Future-state visioning—by designing the ideal consolidated LIMS architecture along with modern lab operations grounded in defined business benefits, best practices, and industry standards
- Designing an implementation roadmap—to achieve the desired future state by outlining the scope, timeline, milestones, dependencies, risks, and resources
- Creating a product roadmap—to support the newly designed LIMS and underlying architecture to ensure system scalability
Once the project was complete, our client consolidated and reduced its fragmented LIMS footprint by 75% with an underlying modern, cloud-based infrastructure that aligned operational processes with business goals, employee needs and customer expectations.
THE IMPACT
Transformational LIMS project increased throughput by at least 50% and cut OPEX by 20%
The industrial testing firm transformed its laboratory operations, enhancing efficiencies, productivity and customer satisfaction while significantly reducing operational costs. This strategic overhaul also streamlined workflows, automated manual processes and centralized customer data, which eliminated redundancies and positioned the client for global expansion. To date, the company has achieved these impressive improvements:
- 50% increase—in lab productivity throughput
- 30 point increase—in NPS
- 20% reduction—in lab results time-to-market
- 20% projected reduction—in OPEX by year one