A clinical research organization migrated from an aging proprietary system to a validated R environment in stages, keeping every active study running throughout.
The organization relied on a proprietary programming stack that had served it for years. The cost of that reliance was rising. Licensing was expensive, the talent pool familiar with the older tools was shrinking, and when experienced staff left, knowledge left with them. Progress on improvements had slowed to a crawl.
Leadership wanted to modernize, but they had a firm constraint. The studies in flight could not stop. Any migration had to happen around live work, not in place of it.
We began by assessing the existing code and the processes around it, so the migration followed how the organization actually worked. From there we moved in stages rather than attempting a single switchover.
At each stage, the new and old systems were run in parallel until the team was confident the results matched. Only then did a workflow move across for good.
The migration was planned around our studies, not the other way around. Nothing stalled, and our team can run it themselves.
The organization now runs on a validated R environment that its own people own. Manual processing across the migrated workflows dropped by roughly three quarters, and annual licensing cost fell once the legacy tools were retired. New staff are easier to find and faster to onboard, because the skills are widely held.
Most importantly, none of this came at the expense of active studies. The staged approach meant the organization modernized while its work continued without interruption.
We can map a staged path that modernizes your stack without putting studies at risk.
Talk to our team