During the second half of the spring semester, two teams of three Kelley MBA students each completed projects working with the Chemical Genomics Core Facility (CGCF) through the Indiana Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute. One team was tasked with increasing market access and service awareness while the other looked at benchmarking and project management regarding equipment usage, maintenance, and new equipment purchasing.
The CGCF is a part of the IU School of Medicine and has machines to perform small molecule informatics, design, and synthesis to facilitate high-throughput screening. They work with both academics and small life science companies for small and large molecule analysis. At the start of the project the team traveled to Indianapolis to meet with the client, tour the facilities, and better understand the challenges they are facing.
Marketing Team
Summary by DJ Tuttle, MBA Class of ’24
Team members included DJ Tuttle, Rex Rumsey, and Sandeep Singh Deora. In looking into the CGCF website analytics we saw a decline in monthly visits over the last 2 years with no organized marketing strategy to raise awareness among academics or industry. In addition, there is no distinct marketing person, and all marketing efforts must be done by the scientists. In talking with the Core members, they noted that they had done some initiatives previously, but there was nothing consistent or recent.
We used the marketing funnel as a tool to explain the journey that customers make prior to purchasing. It served to illustrate the importance of the first levels of the funnel. Our recommendations centered around raising awareness, building interest, and increasing consideration. Given the limited marketing resources, we rated our top recommendations based on ease of implementation, hours investment required and the final impact it would have.
Throughout the course of the project, we focused heavily on the use of their website as a low difficulty for implementation and low time investment way to have a high impact. Working with a Digital Marketing representative from IU school of Medicine and CGCF we looked at ways to improve and update the current website interface. We wanted clear, concise information that allowed for users to engage and follow up with the CGCF Team.
Although the nature of the class does not allow for continued formal follow-up to see if our recommendations were successful, in the final discussion we reviewed the use of the website analytics dashboard in tracking visitors. We also stressed the importance of tracking engagement after different initiatives to measure success and guide repeating an initiative. Two of the three team members still have another year of school so can informally check-in with CGCF to make sure their valuable work is properly marketed. We enjoyed working with the team and are excited to see how they bring to life our recommendations.
Benchmarking Team
Summary by Carolina Herrera, MBA Class of ‘25
Team members included Carolina Herrera, Sarah Mrabet, and Youssef Ezzaoui Rahali. As our main objective for the benchmarking project, we wanted to understand the overall operational status among different teams, best practices, and summarize our findings so the CGCF could conduct interviews themselves to other core facilities. We interviewed six different core facilities at IU, Purdue, and Stanford. Our research focused on six operational aspects: equipment, hiring and training process, quality and audits, ROI and pricing, scheduling, and marketing and communications.
In looking into equipment management, we found that they face rising costs and limited opportunities for negotiation. For disposals, cores typically handle them through trade-ins and university surplus services. For hiring new members, cores face a lengthy process (six to seven months), combined with a tight budget. Even though it was an idea at the beginning of the project, sharing a resource between cores doesn’t seem like a viable option, due to specialized work requirements and time commitment needed (as much as a full time job). For quality and audits, most of the facilities send quality surveys to customers, and communicate their performance assessment through iLab messaging.
On the other side, there’s a lack of formal ROI analysis. Labs measure mostly equipment utilization and variance of usage hours. Pricing strategies are usually different across the cores, with some of them utilizing cost-based pricing, and others offering discounts to already trained students that want to use the lab services. Finally, when looking at Marketing, cores don’t have a specific budget for it, or a dedicated person to focus only in promoting their services.
Our recommendations centered in internal and external next steps to follow. Internally, we suggested creating a shortlist of core labs with high collaboration potential, and map user journey to understand improvement opportunities. Externally, we suggested discussing bundle services with complementary labs, and request marketing support from the different machines manufacturers.
“Working with Kelley MBA students was an eye-opening experience for our Core members. Two teams of MBA students explored various marketing avenues, performed surveys, and created benchmarks for future performance indicators. The CTSI-Kelley core management project showed its value at this first step, and we will be happy to follow up with its implementation. Great work and thanks to the Kelley teams!!”
-Jingwei Meng, Director of High Throughput Screening, Chemical Genomics Core, Indiana Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute & Assistant Research Professor of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology, IU School of Medicine.
*Founded in 2008, the Indiana Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute (CTSI) is a statewide research partnership among Indiana University, Purdue University, the University of Notre Dame, and Regenstrief Institute, along with a number of life sciences organizations, governmental entities and community groups. The Indiana CTSI also engages with the public at every level of research—from basic science to patient care. It has been continuously funded by multimillion-dollar grants from the National Institutes of Health since the Indiana CTSI’s founding in 2008 and is housed at the Indiana University School of Medicine.
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