New England Biolabs connected their product freezers to Salesforce using Heroku, creating an ATM-like system for retrieving enzymes. The setup syncs inventory in real time, lets them spot trends for bundling products, and was built in less than 30 days.
October 5, 2015.
Heroku and Force.com.
In less than 30 days.
Science is a very stressful endeavor because you have to fail a lot before you actually are successful. So anything that allows you to go through as much work as possible in the shortest period of time is going to help you get to that successful experiment a lot faster.
New England Biolabs produces enzymes that cut and modify DNA and started to make those commercially available to the scientific community.
We developed a model several years ago where we were putting freezers of our products out at our customers sites. Those freezers, that inventory was never interactive with us. We didn't know what they were using until they called to refill it. So last year, we went to Dreamforce and listened to how others were using the Salesforce in the platform, thinking about ways to connect in not only their people, but also their product. And we came back and started to think, what would our freezers tell us if we could connect it into our Salesforce environment? How would that help us become more responsive to our customers? It's almost like an ATM for enzymes.
They would go to the freezer, look to see where the product is. They would authenticate themselves, pull the product out, scan the product, lock the door, confirm that they received it, and head back to the lab. That simple workflow process could save them days.
The combined platforms of Heroku and Force.com, we just had to connect it to the freezer itself. In less than 30 days, we had it up and running.
What's exciting to us about Salesforce as a platform is how quickly we've been able to move from a legacy in siloed environment of a number of different applications that didn't talk to each other. Something that's unified and helps us see our customers in the same way that they see us.
We can look for trends across our customers, customers who are using products together perhaps that we haven't noticed before, and that may allow us to bundle those products together or perhaps modify those products that will service the customer in a different way.
By connecting to Salesforce, you're extending your business process directly to the connected customer.
The scientists we sell our products to really are working on the building blocks for understanding how disease works, for understanding how life evolves.
We're helping that researcher get to that Eureka moment eventually faster. Then we're very happy.
