Web App to Drive Digital Transformation across Phytotherapeutic Business

Customer

The Customer is a manufacturer of phyto-based pharmaceuticals located in North America. Unlocking a therapeutic effect of medicinal herbs to the local market, the company delivers to their patients a natural way to manage general well-being, as well as treat a variety of conditions, such as anxiety, pain, insomnia, etc.

Challenge

The Customer hadn’t revised their workflow management for a while and eventually got several business-critical workflows gone outdated. Though suffering from high operational costs and error rates due to manual data processing, the Customer wasn’t clear on the automation scope required to upgrade their business. To begin with, they wanted to improve cumbersome document management workflow and substandard patient experience resulting from a paper-based registration process.

Operating on a strictly regulated market, the Customer had introduced registration for new patients and caregivers seeking to order phyto-based medication on their website. All medical needs specified in the registration were to be supported with proper documentation, in particular, prescriptions and insurance applications. However, the only way that the Customer provided for document submission was by mail, demanding certain efforts from applicants.

Despite a busy document flow, document management was entry-level. The team processed documents manually, which resulted in long validation times and frequent frustration among applicants. Besides, paper docs were prone to loss or damage.

Solution

In the Customer’s challenge, ScienceSoft saw an excellent opportunity to bring digital transformation to the Customer’s business. As a priority task, our team designed and implemented a custom web application for user registration and further authorization on the website. The goal to achieve was streamlined processes of registration and document management.

Registration and document management automation

We planned the development process in a way to be able to track the project progress against the agreed schedule and deliver the best-suited solution in time.

• We investigated the Customer’s business needs and nationally instilled requirements to the phytotherapeutic market. A rigorous assessment of the needs and requirements at the initial stage prevented later solution redesign.
• Angular applications for patients, healthcare professionals and caregivers were designed and further coded.
• We implemented the OAuth 2.0 authorization mechanism to enable users to share confidential data with the web application while keeping it private and secure. Amazon SQS/SNS was used for asynchronous communication between the registration applications and related systems.
• We used M-Files system, powered by the Microsoft Azure cloud platform, as a cloud storage for digital documents submitted by users. For patients’ data like credentials and personal details, we set up Apache Solr so that the application could retrieve and interact with data faster.
• We integrated the authorization application into the Customer’s IT infrastructure: an ecommerce website built on Shopify and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales.

Upon work completion, the cooperation with ScienceSoft didn’t end. Having investigated Customer’s business pains by that time, our consultants offered to automate two more business workflows – order and warehouse management. Appreciating ScienceSoft’s proactive approach, the Customer reviewed the offered solutions and greenlit the projects.

Order management automation

The implementation of a custom order management system and its integration with the Customer’s ecommerce solution brought much-needed efficiency into the order processing. The system enabled centralized visibility into all order, sales, fulfillment and supply information.

Warehouse management automation

For warehouse automation, ScienceSoft analyzed what data about medicinal plants must be collected and processed. This allowed us to design a warehouse management tool best-suited to the Customer’s demands. As the warehousing needs may change with time, we employed abstract APIs to introduce new parameters for data collection swiftly, without reworking the back-end business logic heavily.

Results

With several business workflows automated by ScienceSoft, the company made an important step towards digital business transformation and improved experience for their clients. Now, the Customer can:

• Prevent possible clients’ resistance to undergo a complicated registration process and steadily grow their client base.
• Significantly reduce the manual effort for document collection and processing.
• Save on engaging additional resources to manage patient data while it amasses.
• Prevent order fulfillment delays and errors.
• Track the supply and plan the manufacture accurately.

Technologies and Tools

Java 8, Spring MVC, JavaServer Pages, Spring Security, Spring Data, Hibernate, MySQL, MongoDB, LDAP, OAuth2, Apache Solr, M-Files, AWS SNS/SQS, Microsoft Dynamics 365, FreeMarker, Apache PDFBox, JUnit, Apache JMeter, Gradle, Apache Tomcat