Accelerating Digital Transformation through an Agile, Customer-centric Approach

In an interview with Life Science Review, Mark Mintz, CIO of Charles River Laboratories, shares valuable insights on how to use technology for streamlining business operations that result in improved customer experience.

Could you walk us through the key objectives you achieved in Charles River through digital transformation?

As a company, the core objective of our digital transformation is to focus on bringing people, processes, and technology together to help achieve our goal of taking meaningful time off of the drug development timeline. We are working to achieve this goal by implementing best-in-class technologies that are instrumental in optimizing internal processes into more digitally native ones, which has enabled us to help our clients get their drugs and therapies to patients in a reduced time. 

As part of our digital transformation journey, we are reimagining how we operate internally and engage with our clients. This has allowed us to explore how we can better use data, technology, and process transformation to bring holistic solutions to some pressing concerns. For example, we came up with a new digital recruitment solution to augment customer experience. The tool allowed us to recruit cell solutions donors in a wholly digital manner without the need for any manual intervention by recruiters. As a result, we scheduled our first prospective cell donor within 90 minutes after the social media ads promoted the new product service. This is a significant improvement compared to typical manual methods, which took about three months. And this is just the start, as we are reimagining similar experiences across the organization.

Novel technologies like cloud, advanced analytics, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and microservices empower us to do great things. However, technology alone doesn't make a difference; excellent results are realized when customer-obsessed and continuous learners are involved. 

Strong collaboration between business and technical, functional groups play a significant role in the success of Charles Rivers' digital transformation. 

What are the necessary steps for a company to take the digital route?

Customer-centric design thinking, agile-based test and learn processes, driven by technology innovation are the three core pillars of our digital transformation journey. This ensures that our team is on the right track for creating the best, most optimized experiences for our customers.  

From our experience, I believe an agile-based, customer-centric approach to digital transformation can maximize results. It involves three key steps, an aspiration to reimagine and optimize internal operations, the right culture and people, and a highly collaborative environment that favors creative problem-solving. When employees are given the necessary tools and support, as well as the freedom to test and learn new technologies, organizations can go beyond the intended goals of digital transformation.

What would be your advice for peers and aspiring professionals in the industry?

Leaders need to be bold and continuously test new ideas and technologies. They should not back down from taking things apart and reassembling them to ascertain what works best for them, to uncover better ways to create higher magnitudes of impact. Finally, leaders must continuously push towards reimagining business operations and assessing products through a design thinking lens. This will ensure that products going into market can fully benefit customers.