Outsourcing Success for Life Sciences

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Company Bio

Located in the heart of the Silicon Valley, R&D Logic, Inc. works to connect business and science to help each client perform at its best.

The company’s cloud-based platform helps life sciences teams plan, monitor, analyze, and ultimately manage performance across their R&D portfolios and corporations.

With a small and talented staff in San Mateo, California, R&D Logic leaders designed their software for multidimensional planning and analysis with real-time visibility of performance, which is one of the most critical elements of decision making, re-forecasting, and breaking down departmental silos.

“InApp was the only one that didn’t require royalties or purchasing a proprietary development environment. They didn’t have any nonsense in their quote.” – Randall Brous, President

Overview

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Industries / Solutions

Technologies Employed

Business Challenge

As the world’s hub for technology, R&D Logic’s 2000 launch in Silicon Valley was perfectly aligned to attract technical talent. But in 2013, Wanda Ionescu, R&D Logic CEO, and her team were faced with the challenge of expanding their development team in a region where tech companies were in high competition for quality workers.

“Previously, our developers were local—either full-time employees or contractors,” Wanda explained. “But the workforce available was limited at the time, as well as expensive. We’re a small company, and we couldn’t compete with the big tech companies in the Valley, like Google and Salesforce. Those companies drive the market costs up. So, the decision
to outsource was a big switch for us.”

Wanda took the process very seriously, doing extensive research and getting advice from other business leaders facing similar issues. She cast the net wide to find the right offshore development company—starting in Eastern Europe, her native region, and continuing around the world to other international tech hubs. But she had concerns about outsourcing
with companies in some countries.

“We needed to ensure the right infrastructure and security were in place,” Wanda said. “Regardless of their knowledge of software development, I couldn’t put our proprietary software into the hands of people in a country that didn’t have security.” Eventually Wanda started looking at software development companies in India.

“The moment I started to send out inquiries, I was bombarded with emails and phone calls,” she said. “I spoke to several of them, but none sounded like a good fit for our company. We’re very hands-on, and we make the most of our resources.” But one conversation with InApp changed that.

“The workforce available was limited at the time, as well as expensive.”
Wanda Ionescu
CEO, R&D Logic

Solution

Wanda found InApp after agreeing to a phone call with Rakesh Puri, InApp senior managing partner.

“I immediately connected with him,” she explained. “He had a very quiet way of presenting InApp’s services to our company. I felt he was very trustworthy. He didn’t promise the moon or the sky.”

InApp’s first project started with very specific requirements from the R&D Logic team. Wanda set high benchmarks from the very beginning. “I didn’t know what to expect at first,” Wanda explained. “But I wanted good quality work. I am very hands-on. So, we set up a lot of standards from day one. Over time, we’vecontinued to develop these standards.”

Benefits

Wanda found InApp after agreeing to a phone call with Rakesh Puri, InApp senior managing partner.

“I immediately connected with him,” she explained. “He had a very quiet way of presenting InApp’s services to our company. I felt he was very trustworthy. He didn’t promise the moon or the sky.”

InApp’s first project started with very specific requirements from the R&D Logic team. Wanda set high benchmarks from the very beginning. “I didn’t know what to expect at first,” Wanda explained. “But I wanted good quality work. I am very hands-on. So, we set up a lot of standards from day one. Over time, we’vecontinued to develop these standards.”

One of the biggest contributors to the long-term success is the consistent communication between the InApp and R&D Logic teams. The teams meet every Thursday, and recently added a separate Tuesday meeting for a mobile-specific project. The R&D Logic project manager also constantly remains in touch with the InApp team.

“They’re an extension of our team,” Wanda said. “We work with them constantly. We’re not just giving them requirements and then expecting the completed product.”


R&D Logic configures its solutions to a customer’s business rules. That level of flexibility made quality assurance challenging. The company has worked closely with InApp to improve this process over the years.

“The code needs to be able to handle combinations of many types of parameters,” Wanda explained. “But the downside is that when you make a change, it has to be tested in all the other combinations to make sure it works. We came up with this backend automated QA process with InApp, so now we have very specific scenarios that QA needs to follow when there is a change.”


Like any software company, R&D Logic needs to update software technologies as they evolve. For example, the team just released a new mobile app using Google Flutter, which was the result of the InApp and R&D Logic teams brainstorming together.

“We decided to use this brand-new technology,” Wanda said. “It took a little bit longer than we originally estimated, but we ended up with a good product on a platform that will allow us to be more agile going forward.”