Industry
Life Sciences
Challenge
Smith+Nephew’s legacy PMPA platform slowed innovation with performance bottlenecks, high development costs, and poor handling of unstructured data. Lacking scalability and seamless integration, it led to low adoption, fragmented workflows, and rising support overhead.
Solution and Results
Datavid modernized the PMPA platform with a scalable architecture, reusable components, and agile DevOps practices, integrating tools like Quark, Optiqs 360, and text mining accelerators. The result: faster product development, lower support costs, improved user adoption, and a flexible foundation for data-driven decision-making at scale.
Technology used
Progress MarkLogic, Angular, AWS, Microsoft Azure, Apache NiFi , Java, XML, Fonto, Quark, Optiqs 360
About Smith+Nephew
Smith + Nephew is a leading medical technology company that designs and develops devices focusing on the repair, regeneration and replacement of soft and hard tissue.Setting the Scene
For global enterprises in regulated industries, turning complex, multi-source data into actionable insights is both a strategic necessity and a technological challenge. Smith+Nephew recognized early the importance of having a centralized platform to track and analyze product performance post-market - empowering data scientists, business teams, and regulatory functions alike.
Their Post-Market Performance Analytics (PMPA) platform was built to serve this purpose, but over time, performance bottlenecks, high maintenance costs, and limited scalability began to constrain its potential. From document-heavy workflows to unstructured data mining, the platform needed modernization to remain aligned with evolving business needs and user expectations.
This case study explores how Smith+Nephew partnered with Datavid to enhance system performance, reduce support costs, and accelerate product development. For CDOs and product managers seeking to unlock more value from data platforms while maintaining agility and compliance, this is a blueprint for meaningful transformation at scale.
The 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 semantic search and retrieval of product performance data
- Create reports from product-related data and customisable content
- Efficiently analyse information with MS Power BI and obtain meaningful product performance insights
- 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:
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The 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. 
This approach led to:
- A flexible support model with a full-stack developer 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.
The Outcomes
Faster development of products aligned with customer needs.
Datavid positively contributed to Smith + Nephew's PMPA platform with:
- Increased user satisfaction, adoption, and business ROI;
- An agile, multi-disciplinary team to provide system technical support;'
- Effective management of support tickets;
- Maintenance updates (e.g. regular security patching), 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 business, IT and user requirements.
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