PREVIOUS
STORY
In a world where people expect a ride to show up just a few moments after they order it with the tap of a finger on a smartphone, is it any surprise that life sciences researchers are under tremendous pressure to discover breakthroughs faster than ever?
For New England Biolabs (NEB®), the very technologies that have made people less patient for answers have also turned out to be the solution. In fact, with the Salesforce platform, the team at NEB is able to quickly create and deploy social and mobile apps that make it convenient for scientists in laboratories around the world to get the precious materials they need for experiments.
NEXT
STORY
Connecting the Dots to Help Scientists Go Faster
Because NEB offers the largest selection of recombinant and native enzymes for genomic research, one of its biggest business challenges is ensuring that the right products are available to researchers when and where they need them.
One solution was simple: Put NEB freezers stocked with the materials scientists require in labs around the world. However, while this freezer program allowed NEB’s customers (scientists in labs across the globe) to access products more easily, it still left NEB in the dark about which scientists were using which samples, and how often.
Essentially, NEB still did not know its customers deeply enough. So you might expect customer service or sales to be tasked with finding a solution. But because NEB was using Salesforce already, another group was able to step forward and take a leadership role in the business: IT.
A Hotel Minibar Inspires a Global Solution
In 2012, the New England Biolabs team went to Dreamforce and observed what other companies — like GE, with its connected engine — were doing with Salesforce. But the IT team still wasn’t sure what to build or connect, or even how to leverage the platform more aggressively to be more responsive to customers. Until, that is, the team went back to the hotel to relax and found the answer in their minibar: If the hotel could track the products they were pulling from the minibar, why couldn’t NEB’s freezers track what scientists were purchasing?
SMALL
TEAMS
<100
DAYS
The APIs from App Cloud made it possible to do things that no other platform could. In fact, using App Cloud, NEB started by building a custom inventory app in less than 30 days. This app, residing on a tablet on the front of each freezer, allows scientists to authenticate themselves, view available products, open freezers, and scan products for checkout. Every step of this process is automated and connected on the back end to Salesforce, where NEB can monitor the products being purchased, send automated purchase confirmation emails, and track new buying trends and interests of scientists in real time on a desktop or the Salesforce1 Mobile App.
NEB can also capture customer interaction data, freezer temperature, and lock status to ensure product quality, which was something it could never do before. Additionally, NEB connected Salesforce to its own back-end systems and automated inventory replenishment through its existing ERP system to consistently provide scientists with the products they need on a daily basis.