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LifeCell: Nurturing life sciences solutions to build a healthier future

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LifeCell executed full-fledged Workspace migration in 3 months, halved time needed for content creation, and transformed collaborative capabilities with granular privacy settings on Google Workspace.

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LifeCell is India's largest stem cell and tissue storage bank, its main provider of genetic screening tests, and a leading player in cell and tissue based therapeutics. The Chennai-based firm was founded in 2004 by entrepreneurs who launched a series of healthcare related enterprises including pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, and nanotechnology. The LifeCell mission is to be the largest provider of advanced products and services that address current and future healthcare and personal care needs, leveraging the power of cell, gene and tissue sciences.

Features used
Google Chat
Docs
Drive
Gmail
Google Meet
Sheets
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LifeCell executed full-fledged Workspace migration in 3 months, halved time needed for content creation, and transformed collaborative capabilities with granular privacy settings on Google Workspace.

Google Workspace Results

Halves time needed for healthcare content creation

• Supports solutions building and customer care by enabling 99.9% network uptime

• Enables seamless productivity upgrade with comprehensive Google Workspace migration for 1,200+ workers in under 3 months

• Enhances workflow efficiencies from top management to frontline staff by reducing spam attacks to zero

LifeCell is India's largest stem cell and tissue storage bank, and biggest provider of genetic screening tests, driven by a mission to ensure that the nation's bright economic future is also a healthy one. Founded in 2004 by a group of entrepreneurs, healthcare innovation is in the DNA of a firm that pursues a vast array of leading-edge services and research, from prenatal screening to stem cell transplants and genomic-based oncology treatment.

To succeed in its mission, LifeCell must enable researchers, managers and clinic staff to collaborate seamlessly and securely from points across India, handling sensitive genomic data and exchanging details of proprietary technologies.

For years, LifeCell used a leading open-source productivity and collaboration solution for such needs. But as the business grew, LifeCell began to face network outages, spam attacks and data access glitches that became a drag on productivity and creative cooperation. The problems also raised concerns about the security of sensitive asset sharing, especially since LifeCell had since its founding embraced a work-from-home culture all across India.

The challenges led LifeCell to decide upon a comprehensive migration to Google Workspace as its productivity and collaboration platform, attracted by powerful, cloud-based tools and an intuitive plug-and-play model. The team also felt Google Workspace offered the best network stability and in-built security features among solutions on the market. Guided by partner Searce, Lifecell carried out a seamless transition to Workspace in under three months for its 1,200 plus employees.

In doing so, Sumanth Sarangapani, Chief Operating Officer at LifeCell said that the company unlocked "transformative change" in its ability to drive real-time collaboration across India, with "significant productivity boosts." Searce provided a roadmap for the migration and gave proactive training to ensure that LifeCell was making optimal use of Workspace tools from the beginning.

"By adopting Google Workspace, we gained more than the network stability and enterprise-grade security we sought," says Sarangapani. "Tools such as Google Meet, Docs, Drive and encrypted Gmail fundamentally changed our ability to collaboratively build life sciences solutions and engage securely with patients and partners on sensitive healthcare matters."

Enhancing competitive edge in healthcare with world class collaboration tools

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"By adopting Google Workspace, we gained more than the network stability and enterprise-grade security we sought. Tools such as Google Meet, Docs, Drive and encrypted Gmail fundamentally changed our ability to collaboratively build life sciences solutions." – Sumanth Sarangapani, Chief Operating Officer, LifeCell

Through the Google Workspace migration, LifeCell has achieved concrete measurable results to enable its vision of healthcare empowerment. The 99.9% uptime on Google Workspace was a far cry from monthly outages with its legacy provider. The company achieved the network stability it needs to evolve and meet customer needs in real time. At the same time, the company no longer received any spam, which used to affect employees across the board.

These benefits in turn have yielded xxx% savings in DevOps costs as engineers are freed from the mundane chore of rebooting systems and fighting spam attacks, funds that can be funneled into research, customer care, and solution building.

Sarapangi says that it is in the perhaps less measurable effects of collaborative synergies and streamlined communication that the most important Google Workspace advantages are being felt. This includes instant and secure file sharing in Drive, real-time collaborative editing in Sheets and Docs, and the freedom to communicate in Chat and Meet anytime, anywhere. These productivity advantages have become the backbone of an operation that requires agile and flexible interaction to retain competitive edge in the Indian healthcare space.

For example, Google Workspace has enabled LifeCell to organize its operations into any number of fluid work groups, from software design to logistics and HR benefits, that can come together on a dime for information sharing and problem-solving on Chat and Meet.

"Gone are the days when it took hours, even days to organize a meeting. In terms of productivity, once you gain the ability to gain immediate answers in Chat or Meet, your creative and operational abilities are suddenly transformed." says Sarapangi. "We can respond to urgent research or operational needs as they arise."

Keeping people informed with the latest in medical research

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"Whether people are collaborating in real-time, or working at opposite ends of the day, Workspace tools like Docs and Sheets enable the whole team to get the most out of each other's insights." – Priyanka Prashob, Head of Content, LifeCell

One key example of enhanced productivity enabled by Google Workspace comes in LifeCell's thought leadership operations led by Priyanka Prashob, Head of Content at LifeCell. The life sciences firm believes that informing the Indian public about healthcare issues is key to its mission, so people can make informed decisions for health and wellness planning decades into the future.

LifeCell is constantly updating its popular blog on themes ranging from fertility guidance to congenital disorders, and even popular baby names. In the past, the creation, review and editing process for new content would be a time-consuming process. It involved manual downloading and saving of files, and time lost contacting stakeholders for input.

Using docs, the team has the freedom to come together in real-time on content creation, making changes in a collaborative environment, with automated tracking that clearly marks each team member's contribution. This mode of working has halved the entire time needed to generate and publish a blog post, says Prashob.

Conversely, she says, tools such as Docs and Sheets also enable flexible working patterns to collaborate with optimal efficiency at different times of the day. Say a logistics manager is producing a spreadsheet for lab equipment procurement late at night. The next morning her supervisor can simply open Sheets and access the work directly, with no need for intermediary steps. Inefficient back-and-forth through calls and messaging is eliminated by the ability to work at different times in the same document, through functions such as tagging and comments.

"Whether people are collaborating in real-time, or working at opposite ends of the day," says Prashob, "Google Workspace tools like Docs and Sheets enable the whole team to get the most out of each other's insights, in the most efficient and productive way."

Ensuring peace of mind with enterprise-grade security and advanced privacy settings

"With Google Workspace, we can set up privacy and access settings so that we are in complete control of our most sensitive assets. That means we can collaborate with external partners with complete peace of mind." – GD Bharathidasan, General Manager, IT, LifeCell

For LifeCell, such seamless collaboration requires the most sophisticated security protocols available. This is particularly important as LifeCell works with external partners who must be given varying degrees of access to LifeCell assets.

LifeCell is able to protect sensitive data and research material through the built-in enterprise-grade security of Google Workspace, and features such as encrypted Gmail and multi-factor authentication. Another key factor is granular permission settings for file-sharing, which enables just the right level of access for third parties.

"With Google Workspace, we can set up privacy and access settings so that we are in complete control of our most sensitive assets," says GD Bharathidasan, General Manager, IT, LifeCell. "That means we can collaborate with external partners with complete peace of mind."

The robust security protocols of Google Workspace will also prove instrumental in the next major step in the LifeCell mission: a new service to offer anonymized self-test kits for socially sensitive conditions such as sexually transmitted diseases (STDs).

With self-test kits, customers can perform an STD test in the privacy of their home and send the kit back to LifeCell for lab testing, with no human interaction involved. The built-in security features of encrypted Gmail in online ordering and results delivery ensure the integrity of customer privacy and personal data.

Patients can also request video consultations through Meet, a secure environment for discussing sensitive healthcare concerns. Meanwhile, customers enjoy the peace of mind that all reports are stored with enterprise-grade security in the cloud.

"India is a country that is developing fast, and its healthcare needs will evolve alongside this growth," says Sarangapani. "With Google Workspace solutions that deepen our capabilities, and protect them with top-flight security, we're confident we'll be able to chart bold new paths in Indian life sciences."

*Google Workspace was formerly known as G Suite prior to Oct. 6, 2020.

Google Cloud Premier Partner

About Searce

Searce is one of the largest Google Cloud partners globally with over 12 years of experience, 150+ Google Cloud certifications and 300+ Google Cloud Experts in-house. It works with digital native companies and enterprises to re-imagine and futurify their business.