Smith+Nephew: Better performance & stronger functionality

CHALLENGES 

Lower maintenance, support and development costs. 

Smith + Nephew is the leading medical technology company focusing on tissue repair, regeneration and replacement. 

Since 2018, Smith + Nephew has introduced a Post Market Performance Analytics platform designed for data scientists and business users.  

It is a single source platform for all relevant product performance data. 

It was created to: 

• Enable search and retrieval of product performance data   
• Create reports from basic data and customisable content 
• Efficiently analyse data with MS Power BI and obtain meaningful product information 
• Ensure higher productivity using automated workflow tools   

The platform was initially developed using XML, Java, Apache NiFI, Fonto XML and MarkLogic technologies.  

Datavid reviewed the architecture of the system to identify areas of improvement and cost-cutting opportunities. The main pain points were: 

• Performance problems with the Structured Authoring Solution (Fonto) that hindered its adoption and use. For example, it was not effective with the creation and management of large tables within documents. 
• High development and support costs due to an entirely custom development process
• Challenges in finding a solution for data and text mining that provides an accurate option for extracting product performance data from unstructured sources
• Integration of different sources and types of data

SOLUTION 

Architectural and performance improvements. 

Datavid deployed an agile development methodology, alongside better software development practices such as the reuse of existing features, techniques and software code to reduce effort.  

After a careful architecture review, a two-phases development plan for data integration was identified: 

1. One integration point was developed with the Quark Content Enablement platform, and;
2. One with PMPA Service Tier, which was developed by MarkLogic and later integrated with various data sources, unifying it with the Optics 360 platform. 

This approach has led to: 

• A flexible support model with full-stack developers able to maintain and develop Angular, MarkLogic, Java and Apache NiFi applications and the full application stack. 
• The introduction of Datavid open-source accelerator packages to accelerate feature development (e.g., OCR and NLP).  
• Focused "peaks" for integrating tools to meet the high-value functionality required by users (e.g., peaks for integrating data mining and text mining tools) thanks to Datavid's expertise with accelerator packages.
• A multi-disciplinary team with expertise in open source and licensed technologies, able to provide agnostic solutions to business problems based on S+N's needs.  
• Experienced Azure and AWS DevOps professionals who implemented infrastructure as code and CI/CD pipelines that enable rapid product development. 

RESULTS 

Faster development of products aligned with customer needs.

Datavid contributed concretely to Smith + Nephew's PMPA platform, with benefits like: 

• An agile, multi-disciplinary team to provide second- and third-line suppor;' 
• Effective management of support tickets; 
• Resolution of bugs and what was reported in the live service or User Acceptance Testing environment;
• Code coverage for regular maintenance updates of the application software, and;
• Attention to detail with all major enhancements and development work. 

Datavid reviewed the architecture and provided a flexible team that was able to reprogramme the platform according to technologies that best met the requirements. The work is ongoing and involves an agile approach and support to provide dedicated full-stack developers capable of working on all aspects of the technology stack.