Lifecycle Management Platform

With the offshore team, NIX optimized development processes and deliveries of core “cash cow” products, enabling the client to extend its portfolio, establish a sustainable business, and get leadership within the industry.

Business Domain

Pharmaceutical, Healthcare
Service

Quality Assurance, Web Development
Technologies

Java, C++, .NET

Business Overview

The client is a leading global provider of regulatory information services and technologies for the pharmaceutical industry. It is midsized US company with offices in Europe and Asia.

Challenge

The client lacked the resources to simultaneously support its existing products and speed up the development of new ones. Therefore, the client contracted NIX to pick up a project with a huge code base and distributed enterprise architecture in a complex vertical domain.

Since the client has never operated with decentralized teams in the past and all development was done in-house, it did not have proper technical documentation and was inexperienced in terms of collaborating with remote teams.

Before engaging with NIX, it tried to implement an offshore model with three different vendors but none of them worked out. Thus, there was the initial client skepticism and mistrust.

Solution

NIX immediately assembled and assigned three software engineers to work on the maintenance of a large-scale submission management system. Additionally, we engaged our best technical, analytical and managerial staff to pore over all available sources of information (key client staff, user documentation, old and new requirements) and put together a knowledge base that would help to bring the rest of the team up to speed. In parallel with completing the first assignment, we worked closely with the client to polish the interaction between the development teams. All process solutions were documented and shared with the client for discussion and implementation.

The goal was to amend the existing client-side SDLC procedures to work effectively with the offshore team. Following their unsuccessful offshore experience with other vendors, the client identified most of the internal issues and was open to addressing them. For example, it was ready to share specific business knowledge and technology expertise at the beginning of project. It agreed to send senior technical specialists to the NIX office for knowledge transfer, which helped teamwork considerably.

Outcome

Due to optimized development processes and successful deliveries of core “cash cow” products, the client was able to extend its product portfolio, establish a sustainable business, and provide leadership within the industry. Beyond the standard services that were part of the initial contract (software engineering and QA), NIX provided business analysis, project management, and first-line customer support.

The collaboration, which started with a small team of three NIX developers, expanded to other projects over the years, involving a hundred engineers, testers, business analysts and Scrum Masters. This contributed to the client’s growth and eventually resulted in a series of successful acquisitions.