Managed services team helps a biopharma establish an IT platform

The saying in baseball is that if the umpires are doing a good job, the fans don’t notice them. Only if the umpires mess up do the fans pay attention.

The same is true of an organization’s IT platform.

“An IT platform should just work,” an Optinose executive says. “If something breaks, that’s when everybody will notice it.”

Optinose Inc is a specialty pharmaceutical company that focuses on creating and bringing to market innovative products for patients with diseases treated by ear, nose, and throat (ENT) and allergy specialists. The company’s mission is to improve the quality of life for patients.

In theory, Optinose’s users shouldn’t even notice their IT platform because they’re too busy working with it. But to accomplish that, Optinose relies on RSM US LLP to help keep the system humming along.

Starting up and moving forward

RSM implemented the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Management platform for Optinose. The biopharma was ready to go public and required a powerful, dependable enterprise resource planning platform to support its growing business.

Once RSM had implemented the ERP platform, however, Optinose faced the challenge of how to support and maintain it. The solution: Optinose signed an annual contract for RSM to manage the platform. In a sign of how well the engagement has gone, Optinose has renewed the contract every year since then.

“RSM is knowledgeable about all of the activities that are important to a multinational pharmaceutical company,” an Optinose executive says. “And RSM can always help us with any of those issues.”

After providing initial deployment and implementation services, RSM offered ongoing project and go-live support. And since taking on the role of managed service provider, RSM has provided consulting as well as proactive services related to continuous platform updates and regression testing.

In addition, in the years since the engagement began, RSM has worked with Optinose to tackle a wide range of projects, including data warehouse extracts, resource planning for new partner implementations, and application development enhancements. Optinose executives say open, direct communication is the key to the productive working relationship between the two firms.

“We say to the RSM team, ‘Hey, we need you guys to back up our production database for us, and restore that to all of the Azure test and development systems so that we can begin our testing,’ or something similar,” an Optinose executive says. “RSM helps us with the technical aspects, of course, but it’s important that we have a good working relationship with their professionals, and that we can talk through our ideas.”

The importance of teamwork

Optinose executives say technical experience and effective communication are prime reasons why Optinose keeps renewing with RSM every year—but that RSM’s approach to staffing the engagement is another benefit.

“RSM grows people into good consultants, folks who have the proper skills,” an Optinose executive says. “That’s important, because we want somebody who can help us learn and work with us. We don’t want to just throw the problem over the wall and have them handle it. We want somebody who’s going to work collaboratively.”

Optinose executives say they rely on RSM for advice on best practices for the various areas of system functionality. Optinose also looks to RSM to provide insights into the full potential of Microsoft Dynamics 365, including new features and advanced functionality. In addition, RSM handles compliance with Microsoft-required updates and application enhancements.

“We don’t have multiple people supporting one application,” an Optinose executive says. “It’s more like one person supporting multiple apps. So in cases where we don’t have as much technical expertise, we might need a little help, and RSM often has experience with certain functions that we don’t have.”

Recently, Optinose worked with RSM on expanding the use of material requirements planning in Optinose’s Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Management system. In addition to providing specifics about the nuts and bolts of the project, the RSM team was helpful in simply ensuring Optinose was headed in the correct direction.

“We showed RSM what we were going to do,” an Optinose executive says. “We ran some things, showed them results, double-checked and triple-checked. And we asked, ‘What do you think? Where have you seen success with this approach?’ And together we figured out the right way to go.”

Invisible means seamless

Due to the demands of the life sciences industry, coupled with the strict requirements of a public company, Optinose must maintain a cloud ERP platform that runs as flawlessly as possible. Optinose executives say for that to happen, RSM has to deliver, and they trust the managed applications services team to do exactly that.

The goal is, once again, to work so effectively that no one notices. Optinose executives say many people at the company have never even heard of RSM, and this anonymity is a sign that the cloud ERP platform has escaped scrutiny because of its reliability.