The SaaS development of an application to pass on technical gestures and know-how is no easy matter. To remedy this, the company Sourcin created, in 2011, a multimedia platform combining collaboration and e-learning. For each of its clients, it brings together all of their procedures there in the form of short videos, graphically enriched and segmented into elementary steps. (Mediabook).
In the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry, this transfer of knowledge between staff is all the more problematic because any mishandling can lead to serious errors. The aim: to train production operators continuously and to assist them at their workstation.
Backed by the teams at Premaccess, this SaaS development aims at a platform that allowed Sourcin to innovate two years ago, by switching to the AWS Cloud. Its co-founder Arnaud Schmutz explains to us what AWS brings him in the SaaS development of Sourcin, both in security and in service availability. Two essential components for the biopharma sector, which is in the middle of its digital transformation.
Sourcin embeds biotechnology know-how through video
Main objective of the SaaS: making the videos available 24/7 across the world
Premaccess’s first contributions: high availability of resources thanks to serverless, and speed of deployment
AWS and biopharma: secure data and ALCOA+ principles respected
Sourcin embeds biotechnology know-how through video
“My whole working life has been devoted to the pharmaceutical and biotechnology sector. As my career went on, I realised that having a written procedure was not always a guarantee that it would be understood by everyone. And that the best way to pass on knowledge was, in the end, to show it. That is how the idea of Sourcin was born.
With our clients, we create short videos of 5 minutes maximum as well as animations to show their various technical gestures in production. These videos are silent so that they can be understood by all of their staff. Our leitmotif is clear: “keep it simple and smart”. Brought together, these videos then make up a training path, available on our multimedia platform. By favouring learning paths in “blended-learning” mode, our clients’ staff will watch these Mediabooks, at first on their own – remotely (e-learning) -, to learn the gestures, follow the associated courses and test themselves through quizzes and interactive assessments. Then, in person with a subject-matter expert, they will analyse them in detail before moving on to the workshop. Finally, for the sake of consistency, these videos will serve as assistance at the workstation, since they are available 24/7 and always up to date. With this unique multimedia platform, our clients embed their know-how, to share it better, to make it last, and so to gain in efficiency.”
Main objective of the SaaS: making the videos available 24/7 across the world
“At the very beginning of Sourcin, to pass these videos on to our clients, we burned them onto a CD. We very quickly realised that this medium was inadequate for several reasons: the people holding the CD did not necessarily have a player to read it, they were not necessarily the ones most concerned by its content, and it was possible that they would leave for a competitor with the CD in their pocket. This knowledge therefore had to be secured. All the more so as we work, under confidentiality agreements, with global companies. Second prerequisite: our videos had to be available everywhere and all the time. Our clients are mainly American and European. But their users are based across the world. That is how the first version of our multimedia platform was born in 2011.”
premaccess’s first contributions: high availability of resources thanks to serverless, and speed of deployment
“We have been working with premaccess for almost 7 years. Initially, their teams only handled the hosting and the managed services of our platform. Security is their core business. Gradually, they showed us the benefits of the AWS Cloud. That is how we rethought our interface two years ago in order to migrate to a Serverless architecture and innovative technologies. This required us to rethink all of our needs, in terms of market, features, interface, design and distribution… We are now 100% owners of the SaaS development of our ultra-secure platform. Thanks to this new Serverless architecture, we have gained in video delivery quality. The videos are less compressed, far more precise, better looking. Which is essential to hold the attention of the people connected. We manage user accounts, their authentication, their associated access rights (who can do what on this platform), as well as their personal data in compliance with the GDPR, more easily. What is more, this platform is available in SaaS mode, a considerable advantage for our clients: they just have to log in to it and use it, without worrying about its maintenance.
Moreover, during the SaaS development of this platform, once the structure of a client space had been created, we used BAM to automate the duplication of this central architecture for each of our other clients. BAM (Build Automation Machine, editor’s note) is a tool developed by premaccess. This solution made it possible to automate our deployment easily, quickly and in complete security starting from a template, and to orchestrate the lifecycle of our production.”
GOING FURTHER | Sourcin: creating an e-learning platform for biotech
GOING FURTHER | Sourcin: creating an e-learning platform for biotech
AWS and biopharma: secure data and ALCOA+ principles respected
“The authorities in charge of bringing a medicine to market (ANSM in France, FDA in the USA, EMA at European level) require the data around products to be secured. In this context, since its switch to AWS, Sourcin has been compliant with the Cloud rules in the pharmaceutical sector. During the SaaS development of our platform, we made sure that our data respects the ALCOA+ principle, which guarantees data integrity. This acronym covers nine principles that we follow scrupulously for data management: Attributable, Legible, Contemporaneous, Original, Accurate, Complete, Consistent, Enduring and Available.
This was possible thanks to the sound advice of the premaccess team. With rare expertise, this team is made up of people who are particularly well qualified on the cutting-edge technologies offered by AWS. As the SaaS development of Sourcin progressed, they were a source of proposals. Enough to give our project tremendous leverage.”
Here are some of the AWS services used in this project: