Unlocking new avenues of efficiency and data accuracy

About

Resilience is a first-of-its-kind biomanufacturing innovation partner dedicated to broadening access to complex medications by revolutionizing how they’re made, funded, scaled, and accessed. Their goal is to expedite their partners’ time to market for therapeutics by providing off-the-shelf products and capabilities centered around 5 key areas: biologics, vaccines, nucleic acids and cell and gene therapies.

Challenge

Resilience has experienced rapid growth since its inception in 2020; expanding to nine sites within just three years. During acquisition of these sites, the company adopted a multitude of legacy solutions across different domains, from lab management to finance. Consequently, these disparate systems resulted in a convoluted data landscape.

The previous approach for data consolidation relied on brittle data pipelines and manual data copying across applications. As a result, end users faced difficulties in querying and obtaining insights from the data, which slowed down month-end reporting. Also, datasets often lacked standardization, making it difficult for data scientists to efficiently analyze it. This process not only consumed extensive resources, but it also led to inconsistencies in reporting. The need for a scalable solution became evident.

Solution

Choosing Starburst Enterprise for a data mesh architecture

Recognizing the inefficiencies of traditional data engineering methods, Resilience turned to a data mesh approach to provide connectivity at the source and a governed semantic layer to enable seamless reporting. After careful evaluation, Resilience selected Starburst Enterprise hosted on AWS.

Starburst offered a familiar SQL-based permission management system that simplified access control. In addition, Starburst’s autoscaling and fault-tolerant execution abilities ensured consistent and predictable query times that met Resilience’s scalability, pricing, and performance needs.

Implementing a data mesh architecture with Starburst Enterprise on AWS capitalizes on the scalability of compute with cloud services as well as connectivity to a multitude of systems. These capabilities enable the ability to deliver faster, more accurate access to distributed datasets and data products.

Results

Holistic view of experiment design
Finding its roots first within R&D, Starburst initially allowed Resilience to seamlessly federate data from key systems such as: Benchling (an Electronic Lab Notebook), Ignition (a Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition system), and several other custom solutions that house discrete experimental data. The interconnectivity of these systems immediately provided a comprehensive snapshot of all parts of the experimental lifecycle, enabling scientists to access relevant information where it lived.

Expanding data access across the organization
After successfully achieving a single point of access to its laboratory management data, the data engineering team was then asked to expand their focus to other parts of the business. “To date, we’ve expanded to include datasets across purchasing, time tracking, HR/IS, ERP/Financial, and R&D. We’re even being asked to further explore connectivity to cyber security monitoring tools. That’s the best measure of success,” shares Adam Mendez.

Building data products with confidence
In addition to expanded access to data, using Starburst, Resilience has gained the ability to create over 30 high-quality, curated, and governed data products. By partnering with business stakeholders during the development process, they ensure the accuracy and reliability of the presented data across 20+ essential applications. This eliminates conflicting reports and provides a gold standard for reporting and dashboards. The availability of data products has also driven a 20X increase in BI tool usage at Resilience within the first four months.

Enhanced data governance
Starburst’s built-in governance features, including fine-grained role-based access control (RBAC) and robust security integrations, allows Resilience to meet current security needs while also positioning them to adopt a more dynamic and consistent model in the future. This investment in Starburst aligns with their long-term data governance strategy.

In conclusion, Resilience’s adoption of Starburst Enterprise is yielding substantial improvements in data accessibility, dashboard performance, and overall operational agility. By leveraging the power of a federated query engine, Resilience is setting a new standard for data-driven manufacturing in the biopharmaceutical industry.

More resources: How Resilience is building scalable data products with Starburst & AWS