Project Lightspeed – digital transformation when lives depend on it

Baggrund

In 2020, a small and mostly unknown startup suddenly found themselves with a product that was in such high demand, it was literally going viral.

The research-driven pharma company BioNTech became famous overnight during the COVID pandemic, when they entered the race to develop a vaccine. The project, internally named “Project Lightspeed”, took priority over everything else in the company, which had to radically shift gears with the whole world watching.

Demand was so high, in fact, that their existing technology stack simply couldn't handle the load of a global audience.

BioNTech quickly realized that if they were going to compete with the big players in the pharmaceutical industry, they needed to step up their game: They needed tools to connect a rapidly growing organization, tools to support the high and urgent demand of information from HCPs, optimized digital touchpoints and last but not least capabilities and processes for running all of this at scale.

Løsning

Meeting the demands of the Covid-crisis meant that BioNTech and their Merkle team had to stand up an entire enterprise technology stack and infrastructure in less than a year.

Without a suitable infrastructure, BioNTech faced the risk of crumbling under the relentless pressure of bringing enough vaccine doses to market.

The solution we created encompassed everything from a CRM and CMS to ERP, analytics, MCM, MDM, DAM, MLR, CIAM, commerce, BI & analytics, CDN-enabled global websites, newsletters, portals, mobile apps, sales platforms, and more (for detailed systems and architecture drawings, see attached images).

BioNTech and Merkle set out on a rapid digital transformation journey, enlisting 200 individuals to work in agile squads: From the Merkle office in Copenhagen to BioNTech locations all over Germany, these squads injected startup spirit into the creation and execution of a scalable infrastructure. 

We took over the legacy landscape, including multiple outdated Drupal CMS instances, and began stabilizing and replacing them with a new best-of-breed ecosystem, currently consisting of 20 enterprise-grade systems.

A cohesive technological framework was erected to bolster business procedures across four broad domains, all geared towards providing a superior customer experience:

• Engage, Activate, and Interact including Qualtrics XM for CX measurement
• Plan, Create, and Orchestrate with IQVIA and Salesforce for CRM and sales processes
• Manage, Integrate, and Support with Salesforce and Reltio for data management
• Empower and Enable supported by Confluence and Userlane for digital collaboration and adoption

As the pandemic is wearing off the company is yet again facing change, shifting its efforts back towards oncology. For a company which have hired 75 people a month for the past 2 years this pivot this means training sales staff – from delivering a product in high demand, to having complex conversations educating health care professionals about new cancer treatment options.

That’s why the newest branch on BioNTech’s digital transformation tree is OneAmbition - an app made for their consultants to engage effectively with health care professionals.

Sitting on top of Salesforce OCEP, we created a progressive web app with connected workflows across multiple applications. OneAmbition is a personal tool which adapts itself to the profile of the user. It is designed to get the user in efficient flow by assisting with contextual menus and next best actions.

It replaces 10+ different applications, streamlining functions such as Healthcare Professional visit logging, route planning and optimization, performance monitoring, and gamified incentives for sales representatives.