MasterControl engaged us for more than five years to plan, build and run RapidOnboarder, the web application its consultants use to onboard FDA-regulated customers to its quality management product.
MasterControl makes quality management software for manufacturers of pharmaceuticals, medical devices and food, the industries the U.S. Food and Drug Administration regulates down to the manufacturing step. Every one of those manufacturers has to keep its design and manufacturing documents, their revisions and their history, control who may see and edit them, and prove its people are certified for the work they do, for at least ten years.
A new MasterControl customer therefore arrives with countless documents and records, and uploading them is the small part. The quality management system has to be configured to the customer’s own approval workflows, permissions and regulatory metadata, and every document and its history tied into that configuration. MasterControl’s Professional Services consultants lead each customer through that onboarding.
Until we were involved, the consultants gathered the configuration in spreadsheets and imported both the configuration and the documents by hand. The method was prone to human error and, even when it worked, left significant manual updates to fill in what was missing. MasterControl wanted onboarding time cut by at least half, to spare its customers the fatigue of a long implementation.
The same consultants, the same product, a different way of getting a customer from signed contract to a configured system.
RapidOnboarder is a multi-tenant cloud application. Each customer’s data sits in its own database instance and web services, so confidential records stay compartmentalized, while the hosting is shared for the economies of cloud infrastructure. Consultants open a customer domain from a system console and work through its datasets: users, roles, permissions and the rest of the configuration, several hundred to thousands of records each, and tens of thousands of relationships between them.
Every dataset takes typed entry, a paste from another source or an Excel template filled in and imported, and the table supports fill-down, insert and delete across thousands of rows.
Where a dataset holds product configuration such as roles, RapidOnboarder generates the records and their relationships from industry and MasterControl best practices. We call it autogeneration.
A customer domain can hold several MasterControl servers. Once the customer has reviewed the configuration, the consultant pushes it to development, test and production through the product’s APIs, with no manual import.
Technologies: Java with Spring Boot and Hibernate, Angular with the Ant Design framework and Handsontable, a relational database, Redis, JSON Web Tokens, Docker on Amazon Web Services.
Before the first line of code, we spent more than a year with the Product and Professional Services stakeholders, in a sequence that closely resembles design thinking.
Several hundred hours of sessions on the day in the life of an implementation consultant: the process, the tools, the configuration data types and how they interrelate.
A future state and the software to deliver it: faster capture of interrelated data at first, then the methods to generate a customer’s configuration automatically.
High-level user stories and a clickable prototype of the screens, built with no software and iterated with the same stakeholders until everyone agreed.
Detailed stories with their definition of done, grouped into epics; the minimum viable product and what would follow; estimates for development and testing; the style guide, the screen designs, the stack and a microservices architecture.
A 22-person team of a product manager, a project manager, a requirements analyst, twelve developers and six quality assurance engineers, in two-week Scrum sprints; the first production release landed two weeks shy of a year, after 23 sprints.
The engagement ran for more than five years as a dedicated team at a fixed monthly cost per person, which is what lets a product keep changing scope without a contract change each time.
“Our services organization is scaling quickly and we urgently needed a custom software application to automate our workflows, without breaking our annual budget. CodeStringers was the perfect fit, supporting us from ideation through go-live and everything in between. They innovated, hit their deadlines and released an amazingly high quality application that decreases our internal costs and improves our reputation with our customers. It would not have happened without CodeStringers.”
The results exceeded the objective MasterControl set at the start.
Less onboarding effort.
The first release cut the configuration time for a new customer by 57 percent on average, against a goal of 50; later releases added to it.
For a configuration that took months.
One customer’s configuration, months of elapsed time under the old process, was generated by RapidOnboarder in under 30 minutes.
Of one dedicated team.
Ideation to go-live and every release since, at a fixed monthly cost per team member.
The numbers are MasterControl’s, as the case study on the previous site reported them.
RapidOnboarder was an application that recorded a configuration and routed it to the right server; the same work today is an agentic surface that reasons over the customer’s documents and proposes the configuration for a consultant to approve.
Business systems are moving from applications that record and route to surfaces that reason and act. That is a paradigm shift, not a feature, and we are driving it: the planning gates, the dedicated team and the fixed monthly cost you read about here are how our managed solutions are built and run now, with agents doing the routine work and a person at each gate.
Onboarding, implementation and renewals run from one surface over the applications you already have, as a managed subscription.
The capability under this engagement: product planning, build, quality assurance and operations as one team.
Multi-tenant web applications with the data tables, permissions and integrations a product like RapidOnboarder needs.
Per-customer schemas, tens of thousands of relationships and the services that keep them fast.
Where we're not the right answer
We are not the right answer if you want seats filled and nothing more: every team on this page carried its own product, quality and project people, and the planning gates came with it. Services by the estimate are available today; the long-term focus is the managed solutions.
Every engagement on this page began with a conversation about what was slowing the business down. Tell us yours and we will say, in plain terms, whether we are the right answer, what it would take and what we would measure.
