Q: In discussions with customers using Revvity Signals software, what impactful success stories have you heard and why do these stand out to you?
A: Interestingly, we have seen a mindset change from both our customers and ourselves that continues to create success stories. We have moved from focusing on the product to discussing challenges, workflows, and solutions. Customers no longer say, "Hey, I need an electronic notebook." or "I need an inventory management system." Instead, they're bringing to the table the array of work they do as a scientist and asking what integrated solution we can provide that addresses all their needs, including data capture and analysis, documentation of experiments, easy sharing with collaborators, and remote work with other parts of the organization. 

They know what it's like to live in a world where you have seven or eight software systems, and you're jumping between them. We wanted to help simplify that, so we went from building products to building workflows and solutions for specific types of scientists. I'm proud that our people at Revvity Signals regularly solve these kinds of challenging, complex issues.

Here's one example of this type of success story. A large, global pharma organization came to us to develop software for their chemistry lab. Their need was to be able to test, in parallel, as many as 50 molecules and automate the lab, primarily related to data capture, but also for integration, and data analysis.

It was an exciting and challenging request. We spent several weeks working closely with them and a mini-consortium of other companies also interested in this type of solution. We agreed on the correct workflow and the set of capabilities needed to solve their challenges. We developed a deployment plan that would work for their business and we incrementally delivered those capabilities as part of the Signals Notebook platform.  

It highlights, again, our mindset of focusing primarily on the scientist's work rather than a product focus. Our successful solutions come from this focus alongside a strong collaborative relationship with the scientists all along the way. Their input is crucial to a successful solution. 

In the example above, the speed with which we executed the joint vision of what the software should do also stands out as a success. That speed is made possible through the technology transition we did years ago. Previously, it would take one to four years for the latest version of the software to make it to the scientist's hands because of the complexity of shipping and installing it!  

I was always frustrated, going up and down the halls of our customers and finding people using versions of the software that were multiple years out of date, just because of the friction to deliver. With the advent of cloud services and SaaS, that friction went away. Now, the latest and greatest versions get delivered ten or more times a year. Upgrades are relatively easy and inexpensive. The dynamics have changed for the better.

Q: Please discuss your vision of Revvity Signals product strategy that research scientists can look forward to in the future. 
A: This is something I’m excited about! The first key element of our strategy is a solution-based workflow for Drug Discovery, Industrial Chemistry, and Clinical, which means building end-to-end capabilities for scientists, not simply products. It’s the evolving change of mindset I talked about earlier. 

The second key strategy element involves new therapeutic modalities. Increasingly, the therapies that pharma builds involve more complex, larger molecules or cell and gene therapies, and they need new modalities to test those therapies. The amount of data, along with data tracking, has skyrocketed. Yet scientists may be using basic Notebook workflows to document these complex, large molecule workflows, or even still using Excel. They don't have the right analytical tools, and the tools they use haven't kept pace with the science they now deliver.

Our third focus is the automation of the lab, primarily related to data capture, integration, and analysis. A large number of scientists across hundreds of research organizations are using our platform to do their day-to-day science and collect their data. But it's largely a manual process. They gather the data from one system and then bring it into our system to analyze and review it. Our opportunity is to have the data automatically flow from across systems and algorithms and onto predictive models.

Our fourth key pillar is an initiative that’s already underway. It’s designing a new product for an old, but very common, challenge - collaboration. Many scientific research organizations are decentralized and depend on contract research organizations (CROs) for some of their work. Historically, working with CROs has inefficiencies in many areas for example, how to convey the work to the contract research organization, how to track the progress of that work, how to receive the results, and, if necessary, how to pivot rapidly and say, “Hey, this isn’t working.”

The tools in the space are rudimentary. Excel is still king, as is Outlook, with a lot of emails going back and forth. A couple of years ago, we started putting together tooling on top of the Signals Platform. The goal is to alleviate friction between the collaborators and the sponsors. It’s a critical initiative in our strategic planning.