FOUNDED 
Mid-1970s
SIZE 
37,925 Employees
LOCATION 
Ipswich, MA

A collective of scientists finds new paths to unravel the mysteries of DNA in the lab faster.

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.

"We’re all about helping researchers get to that eureka moment faster.”

–Andrew Bertera, Executive Director of Marketing

“We began to think, 'What would our freezers tell us if we connected them into our Salesforce environment. How could that help us to become more responsive to our customers?'”

–Ken Grady, former CIO at NEB

“It’s not that we built a bunch of separate apps and integrated them into Salesforce. We built directly in Heroku and leveraged our Salesforce objects in real time. That made our development approach much, much quicker, cheaper, and easier.”

–Ruben Melo, Senior Business Systems & Applications

The
business
challenge

The business challenge

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.

THE AHA MOMENT  

The
'aha!'
moment

The 'a-ha' moment

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?

THE BUSINESS CHALLENGE  

SMALL
TEAMS

0.5 internal full-time employee, 1.5 external developers, and 1 project manager to accomplish.

<100
DAYS

to build v1.0 design.

Featured App

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.

A closer look at the architecture and technology that made the NEB solution successful

For NEB, App Cloud offered a complete set of services to create every piece of the solution, including a secure and trusted way to connect it all. From the foundational elements to build on, to the tools to build with, integrate, and manage, Salesforce gave IT all that was required to help drive the business forward, faster.
1
3
4
2
1
An NEB freezer stocked with its products is located in a customer’s laboratory. On-site, scientists use the tablet mobile user interface on the freezer to authenticate themselves, and the freezer is then triggered to unlock. Scientists can then view inventory categories and check out or purchase inventory.
2
The scientist’s purchase and interaction history is then transferred via Ruby on Rails into Heroku. It is then recorded and synced into Salesforce via Heroku Connect.
3
Heroku allows New Relic to alert NEB of any app performance errors. And Salesforce sends a purchase receipt to the scientist via email.
4
Once the transaction is synced to Salesforce, NEB employees can view and track customer interactions or trends and adjust inventory in real time from their desks. Additionally, NEB executives can see the data via the Salesforce1 Mobile App from anywhere, gathering insights from dashboards to see which products were profitable, what was purchased, and how to optimize for inventory.
E-BOOK

The Trailblazer's Guide to Apps

Discover how trailblazers across nine industries are building apps to drive productivity, boost collaboration, and connect with customers in a whole new way.
GET THE E-BOOK