Engine Room’s Quick Delivery of a Pharmaceutical Company’s Scalable, Feature-Rich Website

Executive Summary

A leading pharmaceutical ingredient supplier contacted Engine Room to prepare a brand new website in time for the launch of a new dynamic line of products. While the products were in the final formulation stages, Engine Room got to work implementing and integrating the brand’s CMS, CRM, ERP, and eCommerce marketplace tools. This ensured data was flowing seamlessly to all the necessary integrations, without any disruptions or changes to the company’s internal processes. 

What’s more, Engine Room built in logic specific to the pharmaceutical industry for pharmacists to review product certificates of analysis (COAs) and location-based logic to match state-by-state regulations. The site also includes over 40 plugins, options for easy automatic reordering, and the incorporation of several major systems and customizable discounts for sales reps. Now, sales representatives can spend less time processing paperwork and sales, and more time connecting with customers and amplifying the brand. 

Serving Leading Brands with Complex and Dynamic Needs 

For this project, Engine Room was hired by a leading supplier of pharmaceutical ingredients, niche pharmaceuticals, and equipment for pharmacies. While the brand handles some direct consumer sales, the company primarily works with compounding pharmacies and pharmacists, and serves the diverse array of needs of these pharmacists with products, programs, and services catered to their unique line of work. 

Creating Robust Infrastructure to Compliment Innovative Designs

This pharmaceutical company was preparing for a new product launch. The brand’s line of products is unique in that it has been formulated and backed by both doctors and pharmacists—and the brand wanted a new website to amplify their existing work while also championing this new endeavor. They had an existing, custom design for their website, but needed a robust infrastructure to support all of the features and functionalities called for to power the next phase of their business. 

Delivering Scalable, Agile Platforms That Sync With Existing Operations

This project called for a fairly quick turnaround, and with a website infrastructure that came with a long list of complexities, the Engine Room team got to work consulting the pharmaceutical brand right away and planning their new site. 

The website needed to be built with the capacity to scale and add new products each year, and called for a content management system (CMS), customer relationship management (CRM) tool, full eCommerce integration, an enterprise resource planning (ERP) tool to manage invoicing and shipments, and plenty of personalizations and additional logic built into the entire site.

Among these challenges, the client needed pharmaceutical-specific logic integrated throughout the site, which allows pharmacists to look up the certificate of analysis (COA) for each product, a must to meet industry standards. Engine Room had to build additional logic to meet the various laws that differ from state to state. To add to these challenges, the company’s products were still in development close to the time of the launch, which meant flexibility was key throughout the creation of the site.

Essentially, the challenge was that this was a bigger company that needed a website that would operate like a startup; their site needed to be scalable and agile while still connecting to the many backend tools the brand uses to operate on a larger scale. All of this had to happen without creating any new internal operating processes for the client. Engine Room needed to deliver a quick rollout with a fully-functioning eCommerce platform, one that gelled with their existing operations as well as the stringent regulatory requirements.

Providing Seamless Customer Experiences Via Custom Integrations and Engines

The Engine Room crew worked closely with the marketing, operations, and sales teams to ensure that throughout the creation of this new website, the internal processes remained the same. The design was created for mobile devices first, which means that all of the functionality is also available on smartphones, tablets, and all other mobile devices. 

With all kinds of integrations and dependencies, data needed to flow freely in multiple directions and provide a seamless eCommerce experience for customers. In total, the site includes:

Over 40 plugins and several major systems

• Pantheon
• WordPress
• WooCommerce
• Freshsales CRM
• Custom ERP integration
• Avatax and Fedex
• USPS address validation

The website also includes Doc Code Module, which distributes account-specific discount provider codes to users, which can all be linked to individual providers and stores to give them credit for their purchases. Engine Room built a custom discounting engine sales representatives can use to provide custom-tailored discounts and offers to each client and pharmacy. 

Additionally, the website is equipped with a specialized Stripe integration to establish automatic reordering options for customers and pharmacies, as well as special logic set up to automate the process of sending displays to participating pharmacies. 

This Digital Transformation Initiative achieved several objectives for line-of-business owners including:

• Enhancing the Customer Experience: The new platform offers new ways of retaining and attracting customers.
• Modernizing Operational Processes: These automations and included plugins and programs have greatly reduced the time the company’s personnel spend on administrative tasks and more time on positive business outcomes.
• Becoming More Data-Driven: The company has found new ways to derive insights and improve decision making, critical to digital transformation success.

Engine Room is passionate about delivering custom, premium services for their clients, so that no matter the specifications of their next site, the Engine Room team has it covered. 

To learn more about how Engine Room can help you, book a free consultation today.