Transforming legacy workflows into an industry‑first customer portal
Pharmaceutical customer portal
UX Design
Product Design
User Research
UI Design
Branding
Digital Campaign
Transforming legacy workflows into an industry‑first customer portal
Context
Overview
Alcami is a leading U.S.-based CDMO (Contract Development and Manufacturing Organization) with over 45 years of experience in advancing pharmaceuticals and biologics, supporting pharmaceutical and biotech companies with specialized services throughout the drug development lifecycle. With a network of six scientific campuses across the United States, Alcami offers integrated solutions spanning analytical development, clinical to commercial sterile and oral solid manufacturing, packaging, microbiology, cGMP pharma storage, environmental monitoring, and pharmaceutical support services.
Internally, they were leveraging a legacy sample submission tool that had grown complex, siloed, and difficult to navigate. To support scalability and improve efficiency across teams, Alcami initiated a modernization effort focused on redesigning its internal service platform aimed at elevating usability, reducing training time, and enhancing process adherence.
Challenge
The Problem
Launching a customer‑facing portal inside a regulated environment meant balancing compliance with modern SaaS expectations. We needed zero‑downtime migration and airtight audit trails, while ensuring external clients could submit samples in minutes, not hours. Additionally, internal teams relied on tribal knowledge. Winning their trust required incremental rollouts and clear value propositions to shift entrenched habits.
Alcami OnDemand is designed to allow Alcami’s customers and prospects rapid access and visualization of their ongoing projects. The portal serves as a single source for customer project and order management with shared views to manage orders, libraries of compounds, test results, timelines, and accounting information.
Goals
The Solution
Our goal was to deliver a frictionless experience that empowers internal specialists and external clients alike, without compromising the rigorous compliance demanded by the pharmaceutical industry.
Boost usability and adoption across internal and external client teams
Provide rapid, self‑service sample submission and real‑time order tracking
Harmonize terminology and UI patterns across the experience
Reduce reliance on email, spreadsheets, tribal knowledge, and customer support
Establish scalable design patterns for future scaling
Data
Research Insights
To ground design in reality, I partnered with internal stakeholders, SMEs, department managers, analysts, IT leads, and a pilot group of analytical‑testing clients. I reviewed support tickets, observed customer‑service calls, and spent time onsite shadowing the entire sample‑testing lifecycle to capture all processes, pain points, and gaps.
Key findings:
Clients struggled with sample status and limited data access
Heavy reliance on tribal knowledge instead of formal training internally
Inconsistent navigation paths led to avoidable errors
Unclear field labels and system feedback eroded confidence
Desire for streamlined dashboards and intuitive task tracking
Strategy
Approach
Partnering with engineering and business stakeholders, we split workstreams: internal data cleanup and OnDemand portal creation. I prioritized issues into an actionable backlog, mapped critical workflows, rebuilt the info architecture around user mental models, and introduced a foundational design system to unify components.
On-site workflow‑mapping workshops with SMEs to capture end‑to‑end lab processes
Click‑through prototypes for rapid stakeholder validation
Feature flags enabling incremental, low‑risk releases
Analytics instrumentation to track adoption and task completion
Regular compliance checkpoints to ensure regulatory alignment
Design
Process
Key outputs:
Portal dashboards showing real‑time project status with snapshot views
Pre‑populated forms, reducing data entry during sample submission
Redesigned flows for task routing, approvals, and audits
Reusable UI components are documented for both internal and external products
Validation
Testing
Testing lived inside every sprint. We debuted OnDemand with a beta cohort of analytical‑testing clients, while gating internal functionality behind feature flags to safeguard production workflows.
Each pilot was paired with analytics dashboards and bi-weekly feedback loops, translating adoption, task‑completion, and error‑rate data into insights that fueled rapid iteration.
Compliance drills with department leads and usability sessions with clients validated:
Clear labels and guided sample submission steps
Real‑time status prompts and project dashboards
Error handling and validation feedback
Improved task visibility and progress tracking
Outcome
Impact
The modernized platform, anchored by OnDemand, served as Alcami’s single source of truth, streamlining every internal workflow while giving clients a reliable, real‑time window into their projects.
Key results included:
Beta clients submitted samples 74% faster and reported higher overall satisfaction
Internal onboarding time for staff dropped significantly
Support queries related to navigation and data entry decreased
A reusable design system is now leveraged company‑wide
Viewed collectively, these results highlight that embedding user‑centric design within a stringent regulatory framework not only satisfies compliance mandates but also unlocks measurable efficiency gains, elevates transparency for clients, and fosters increased brand trust.
Appearance
Identity & Branding
While outward‑facing products follow corporate brand guidelines, I extended Alcami’s design language internally, introducing clearer hierarchy, simplified color usage, and modular components to reinforce consistency.
Highlights include:
Clean, pharma‑appropriate color palette with accessibility in mind
Scalable icon set tailored to industry workflows
Design‑system tokens for typography, spacing, and states
Branded templates for training decks and internal demos
Final Thoughts
Reflection
Integrating data inherited from multiple acquisitions added a formidable layer of complexity. We drove phased migrations, standardized schemas, and reconciliation scripts to unify disparate databases so OnDemand could surface a single, trustworthy source of truth for clients and internal teams alike.
Leading the effort end‑to‑end deepened my skills in translating complex SOPs into intuitive interactions—and proved that even the most constrained environments can benefit from modern UX thinking.
