"A powerful and easy-to-use tool to gather data."

Here at Better Technology Consulting we're proud of the relationships we build with our customers. In this article we'll take a look at how a project works from start to finish - and the value we bring to our clients' business.

The Client

Based in Bristol, UK, Tocris Bioscience is a leading supplier of novel and exclusive pre-clinical research tools, to the life science industry. Tocris has been working with scientists for over 30 years, to make the latest tools available to academic institutes and pharmaceutical companies around the world. 

Tocris is a brand within Bio-Techne, alongside the other best-in-class life science brands R&D Systems, Novus Biologicals, Protein Simple and Advanced Cell Diagnostics.

The Challenge

As a supplier of products for pre-clinical research, there are specific clinical terms that Tocris do not want to use in their marketing copy. The challenge was to quickly identify these clinical terms within a number of different paragraphs of text so users could remove the offending terms.

Although familiar with excel, the formulae the client was using to identify the cells containing these terms, couldn't highlight the exact location the term existed within the text string in the cell. Doing this manually was extremely time-consuming, error-prone and not an acceptable long-term solution.

The Solution

After discussing the requirements with Tocris, Better Technology Consulting developed a macro that would highlight cells containing the offending terms' specific location within each paragraph of text at a click of a button. The macro worked perfectly first time, and the entire process from start to finish took less than 24 hours.

Once tested on a real data set, the macro was optimized further by bringing back clinical terms that were hyphenated within each paragraph. The optimization significantly speeded up the execution time of the macro and provided the end users with another option if they were under time pressure.  

Looking Ahead

By working closely with our client, we were able to rapidly produce a solution that not only solved the initial brief but also added quality-of-life option to make the lives of our users that little bit easier. The macro has saved countless hours by automating the process, allowing the users to focus on the more challenging aspects of their day-to-day role.

"The tool works brilliantly! Thanks for turning it around so quickly."