Unlocking Speed and Scale for Amira Pharmaceutical

 

The pharmaceutical industry is fast-paced and innovative. As companies build new products, innovate and discover new treatment methods, the need for rapid training and marketing to sales representatives, physicians and the public has accelerated. 

Mobile-app-based learning platforms can help personnel and consumers master complex concepts and product information as released, but only if the application is robust, flexible and scalable enough to meet the demand and function as promised. 

Amira is a startup company in Germany's pharmaceutical industry. It provides an educational platform for pharmacists, students and pharmaceutical staff to gain and share knowledge. To introduce new products to pharmaceutical stakeholders, Amira offers short introductory product courses and an online campus that releases video and written content on a near-daily basis. After completing a course or studying material, pharmaceutical employees can test their knowledge of products through quizzes. 

The platform proved hugely successful, and 26,000 users registered on the application. However, it became apparent that the app could not efficiently support and sustain the high growth of its user base. It began experiencing lag and occasionally broke down, resulting in a poor user experience and limiting Amira's ability to scale its user base. In addition, the underlying architecture created administrative difficulties that made it difficult to introduce new requirements or fix simple bugs. 

 

GOALS

Amira selected Acrontum to increase the application's performance and scalability and address the much-needed bug fixes and difficulties with implementing new requirements. Acrontum's technical expertise and agility positioned the company to meet the project's technical needs within its budget. 

Acrontum established three critical goals for the Amira project: 

1.    To sufficiently raise the application performance to handle current and future usage and enable Amira to scale in the future; 
2.    To fix the bugs that hampered the user experience and negatively impacted app features; 
3.    To implement new requirements that would extend the value of the Amira app and enrich the user experience even further.

CHALLENGES

The Amira application's existing infrastructure was restrictive, limiting the ability to implement new requirements and update the existing application. Working with Amira, Acrontum assisted with determining whether to refactor or rebuild areas of the app, considering their budget and time constraints. 

Due to the app's popularity, it was also necessary to support the existing application while building the new version, leading to two work streams. 

STRATEGY

Acrontum began work by analyzing the existing application and its performance, including the infrastructure, databases and feature functionality. The development, infrastructure and QA teams set up automated tests to scope the project and determine the cause of the performance issues. 

Acrontum identified several problems early on. Initially, the team focused on short-term performance, bug fixes, and rapid maintenance during crashes to improve the app's functionality. It became apparent that devoting resources purely to maintenance would detract from the ultimate goal of enhancing and extending the app itself. 

Ultimately, the client and Acrontum decided to rebuild large parts of the application, reusing existing (open source or commercial) components wherever possible to reduce costs. A new application was built, using a cloud-hosted Kubernetes cluster to automatically scale individual services as required. 

This approach met the budget-conscious client's needs and enabled Acrontum to roll out new features as quickly and cost-effectively as possible. 

RESULT

Focusing on short-term performance fixes enabled Amira to continue building its user base while Acrontum developed the new version of the app. Acrontum redeveloped core features in a microservice architecture to enable scale. The team chose to host the app within a self-scaling cluster. This environment gave the app the ability to handle varying loads. 

Amira could focus on growing the number of users and functions of their app, knowing that their infrastructure was working efficiently in the background and could support their ambition. 

Refactoring and rebuilding the app allowed both teams to roll out a more customer-centric design, with new features and feature enhancements tailor-made to app users. 

Acrontum created a simplified admin portal to solve the administrative issues that enabled the team to do their daily maintenance tasks without the previous dependency on tech resources. 

As budgets were limited, Acrontum focused on quick wins and improved work processes, repurposing existing software to enhance features, e.g. using a direct database GUI and enabling the team to gather greater insights from it. In addition, they introduced enhanced security to meet customer and regulatory requirements. 

CONCLUSION

Acrontum's work with Amira's application perfectly demonstrates how smart, agile working in close collaboration with a client can save money and dramatically improve application performance in a short amount of time.