Biopharmaceutical innovation has never been more expensive. Bringing a single new drug to market now costs an estimated $2.6 billion, according to the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development and that investment is increasingly exposed to patent expirations, biosimilar competition and pricing pressure that erode revenue on established products.
In this environment, leading biopharma companies are under sustained pressure to extract more value from every research dollar, including the laboratory equipment and capital assets that power discovery. Accurate, real-time visibility into where assets sit, how they are used and what they cost is no longer back-office housekeeping. It is a direct lever on research productivity and capital allocation. For one global research leader, fragmented and unreliable lab asset data had become a drag on both and it turned to Persistent to fix it. The client is a leading global, R&D-driven biopharmaceutical company and one of the top 20 pharmaceutical companies worldwide by revenue, with deep franchises across oncology, rare diseases, gastroenterology, neuroscience and plasma-derived therapies. It operates advanced research laboratories across multiple regions, with roughly half of its revenue generated in the US and a quarter in Europe.
Fragmented Lab Asset Data Inflates Costs and Stalls Research
As the client scaled the automation demand across its R&D and supply chain functions, it lacked an industrialized delivery model to assess, prioritize and execute use cases at speed, which slowed its time to value. The gap was sharpest in lab asset management, where disconnected point solutions denied scientists and finance teams a single source of truth. Financial records drifted from the actual status of assets, redundant service contracts and underused equipment inflated costs and researchers lost productive hours locating instruments. With no end-to-end visibility into the asset lifecycle from acquisition to retirement, the client could not make confident capital decisions or stand up new research facilities with the operational rigor it required.
Automation Factory Powering One Lab Asset Lifecycle Platform
Persistent set up an automation factory model for the client’s R&D Automation team, anchored by a dedicated intake pod. The pod collaborates with business functions across the organization to capture automation use cases, run feasibility assessments and jointly define scope, plan and delivery pod structure. Delivery pods then build and system test solutions across multiple technologies, including Appian and Microsoft Power Platform, before handing them over for user acceptance testing.
Persistent extended this factory model from R&D into the supply chain function and into the GLAMS (Global Lab Asset Management System) program, a low-code lab asset platform built on Microsoft Power Platform and Microsoft Dataverse. The team developed new GLAMS capabilities spanning asset audit, asset reservation, asset onboarding, transfer and offboarding, service contract extraction and maintenance, space planning, physical property maintenance and reporting and reorganization modules, while enhancing and supporting previously implemented use cases.
To protect sensitive lab and financial data, Persistent strengthened the security model for GLAMS and the broader low-code application platform (LCAP), aligning access controls with the client’s governance requirements.
The team also delivered GLAMS analytics dashboards and reports, consolidating asset data across the lifecycle into a single view for scientists, finance and leadership.
A stable, cross-functional team of engineers, delivery leaders and account managers ran GLAMS DevOps, covering enhancements, L3 support and reporting across the platform.
Standardized Asset Management and Smarter Capital Decisions
With Persistent, the client was able to:
- Open its flagship research facility on schedule, with GLAMS serving as the asset management backbone the launch depended on.
- Reduce costs by accounting for assets accurately and eliminating redundant service contracts, cutting wasteful spending on taxes, space and underused equipment.
- Consolidate fragmented point solutions into a single, enterprise-licensed platform, standardizing asset management across the organization.
- Accelerate delivery of new automation and lab asset use cases through a modular architecture and a repeatable intake-to-delivery factory model.
- Give scientists, finance and leadership full transparency into asset data across the lifecycle, recovering lost research productivity and enabling data-driven capital decisions.
- Sustain high delivery quality against SLAs, with measurable productivity improvements and strong stakeholder satisfaction from a consistent, stable team.
A Genuine Extension of the Team
Many partners can staff engineers. What sets Persistent apart is that they don’t just provide headcount: they bring a cohesive unit of skilled engineers, delivery leaders and account managers who operate as a genuine extension of our team rather than as an external vendor. They invest in understanding our business context, our technology landscape and our strategic priorities, which means they contribute to solution design and decision-making, not just execution.
Head of R&D Automation, the client
Lab Asset Oversight Becomes a Strategic Advantage
By combining the power of Microsoft’s low-code ecosystem with deep domain expertise in life sciences, Persistent transformed lab asset oversight from a fragmented, manual burden into a strategic organizational advantage. GLAMS now serves as the backbone of centralized asset intelligence, driving efficiency, compliance, cross-functional collaboration and smarter capital allocation across the client’s global research operations.
