BioInformatics

About BioInformatics

 

BioInformatics LLC provides critical market intelligence to marketing departments of major suppliers serving the life science, medical device and pharmaceutical industries. It operates the world’s largest market research panel of 70,000+ scientific consumers who use advanced instrumentation and supplies in their laboratories. Panel members offer valuable insights via periodic studies about clients’ products and services, their markets and competitors.

 

The Challenge

 

For years, BioInformatics was a publisher of off-the-shelf reports. It would poll its panel of “white coat” scientists, produce the reports and then sell PDF versions to clients. About five years ago, new successes transformed the business into one that provided more custom research and advisory services. However, its report delivery hadn’t evolved, so it soon became stretched to capacity by large numbers of custom research requests.

 

At the same time, with the advent of social media and online presentation systems, BioInformatics saw the need to upgrade the user experience through a more elegant and engaging way of presenting reports to clients. It became obvious that conducting research, putting the results in Excel spreadsheets and then producing 200-page PDF reports no longer met the needs of busy executives already suffering from information overload.

 

As such, company executives began investigating other software options that would enable them to obtain automatically updated data based upon continuous interactions with panel members, then dynamically present the research results faster and in a more engaging manner.

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Requirements​

 

To accomplish this, they determined they required an automated survey/campaign platform, a social shell, and a third component – an online presentation system. Key requirements for this third component included a system specifically designed for survey research data, which included stringent security features. They also wanted to reduce publishing costs and time to market in order to meet high-volume demand for offerings.

 

Finally, the cloud-based system had to be intuitive for BioInformatics staff to learn, and marketing clients to use – and needed to be backed with quality support and training services.

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The Solution

 

According to Bill Kelly, president of BioInformatics, “We had planned on developing a proprietary online reporting platform before we discovered Dapresy. Adopting Dapresy allowed us to go to market with our Interactive Market Intelligence service six months earlier than planned. We evaluated a number of different platforms and only Dapresy was specifically built to handle quantitative survey data within an infographics-based marketing dashboard.”

 

The implementation and training processes for Dapresy’s dynamic KPI-driven dashboards went smoothly. Since rolling them out to clients, BioInformatics has found three Dapresy features to be highly valued.

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• Dynamic Filters: Prior to Dapresy, BioInformatics often created 100+ PDF pages for each report to simply present survey results sorted by various respondent attributes, such as region or industry. Today, Dapresy’s dynamic filtering capabilities provide BioInformatics clients with all of the drill-down, comparison and custom data views required. Hierarchical filtering capabilities give them complete data and functionality control over how viewers see data and interact with the system. Filtering provides hundreds of views of data. For example, using filters, clients can compare results by region, industry and many other attributes. More recently, based upon client requests, BioInformatics staff quickly and easily added an additional filter (age of respondent), when they learned that there were large brand preference differences based upon scientists’ ages.

 

• My Story: BioInformatics’ marketing clients have learned to appreciate Dapresy filters. But polling scientific consumers on 50+ questions may result in thousands of different ways to analyze the data. Even a well-designed dashboard that has only 6 to 10 page views can -- through filtering -- produce hundreds or even thousands of page views. This can pose a practical problem when it comes to day-to-day sharing of the information. With the My Story feature, clients can easily save custom views of dashboard results for future use. This has proved valuable, because although BioInformatics has tried to anticipate client needs, there are often unique requests that can’t be anticipated. Now, clients interrogate the database, obtain the answers they are seeking, create a dashboard view and then save it. These custom slide views automatically update with each new wave of the data.

 

• Export: Clients can easily export standard dashboards and custom slide sets to PowerPoint. They use this capability regularly when presenting to stakeholders within their organizations. This added flexibility enables them to benefit from the power of dashboards, while also allowing them to present slides to specific people who require only simple views and prefer a familiar format.

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Since making the decision to move to an online presentation system, BioInformatics’ business has evolved even further. While the initial plan was to roll out Dapresy (which is branded as IMI – Interactive Market Intelligence tool) for the largest research markets, the firm quickly found that changing trends aren’t as pronounced in established markets – so clients subsequently have less interest in tracking them on a near real-time basis. As a result, execs have now refocused efforts on several emerging markets, such as CRISPR, a new technique that is revolutionizing genetic research. In such fast-evolving markets, getting research results to clients quickly has proven even more urgent.

 

Previously, with PDFs, it often took six weeks (including fielding) or longer to produce and deliver lengthy reports. Using Dapresy, staff can now deliver interactive dashboards in less than a week. This has enabled BioInformatics to move with agility into and become successful in new markets of high interest to clients, something that wasn’t possible before. 

 

“Data visualization is a key element of modern market research,” noted Kelly. “Our Interactive Market Intelligence platform powered by Dapresy enables our clients to quickly see the big picture of what’s going on in their market. As new questions arise, Dapresy gives them the tools to interrogate the data and drill down to understand how customer behavior differs by region and market segment.”

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Outcomes Achieved 

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• Enabled BioInformatics to go to market with Interactive Market Intelligence service six months earlier than planned.

• Time to market to produce sophisticated reports has been cut from five weeks to one.

• Has achieved aggressive client and financial targets.

• Feedback from customers in marketing departments, strategy centers and corporate information centers is that they are delighted with the power of these engaging interactive dashboards.

• Has achieved flexibility to adapt to market trends. Now offers and regularly updates seven different dashboards. Clients can purchase each individually or together as a bundle. This provides clients with more purchasing options.