Sales Enablement ROI for Medical Devices

A sales ROI tool that takes into account unique facility case volume and insurance reimbursement practices.

Problem

Our client, a Fortune 500 medical device manufacturer, had been working with contractors like Fast Forward and others for years, building and extending a series of ROI calculation tools. Over time, this amalgam of different tools had been pulled together - with a tight timeline and a tight budget - by another contractor into a proprietary platform on iOS. The client then opted to move to a more robust sales enablement platform - Showpad - and wanted out of the proprietary (read: “expensive to update and maintain”) platform and on to this new shared one. The problem was the low code quality, driven by the aforementioned tight timelines and budgets, and by the wide range of abilities of contractors working on these tools.

Solution

I was the lead developer in assessing the existing AngularJS application and deciphering its interfaces with the wrapping platform. The initial port was from AngularJS 1.0 to React 16. This alone required understanding the differences between AngularJS and React. For example, Angular has two-way data binding, and React does not. Angular also works as a mini, client-side MVC framework, and React does not. While I cribbed the majority of the logic from the existing AngularJS app, there were several custom-written services that I developed from scratch, such as report generation and application routing.

In addition to the framework port, the code was also several years old, so I was porting these services and components from pre-ES6 to post-ES6 JavaScript.

Finally, once the initial framework and language update transitions were complete, I examined the different external port and adapter interfaces, and rewrote them to interact with Showpad instead of the proprietary platform.

Results

This initial port of the product from an old, spaghettified codebase to a cleaner, modern codebase was three and a half years ago, and I am still working on extending this tool as the medical sales landscape evolves. My employer has brought three additional developers onto the account to help extend the product, and we have expanded into three other divisions to replicate the work I did in 2020. We have working with additional divisions to develop entirely different products - in fact, we are closing in on our 40th separate contract with this customer. This project was, and continues to be, a rousing success that now drives >$100 million in annual sales across >2,000 sales representatives.