For people outside the life science consulting industry, it may be a little difficult to visualize what these consulting firms do. As President, Steve Rushin explains that Alliance Biotech Solutions (ABS) provides many types of support, partnering with manufacturing firms to help them solve problems and bridge gaps on large projects.

“The example I always give is if you wanted to buy a new car, you know you want your car to be green, have 4 wheels, have air conditioning, do 0-60 - we help write the specifications to buy the piece of equipment, to make sure you buy the right car, and then we test it to make sure it does all of those things, as well as make sure it is maintained in a proper order.”

To succeed in a highly technical industry, ABS requires staff with both deep scientific and engineering knowledge alongside project management expertise. They employ chemical engineers, alongside people with degrees in other sciences or relevant work experience.

The Challenge:

Managing 60 projects in a spreadsheet

As the company grew, the number of projects it was working on also swelled to 60. In 2024, Steve and the team were using a huge spreadsheet to track project performance. When Holly, the Controller, joined the company, she would have to review this spreadsheet, create invoices in Word, export to PDF, and run manual checks against QuickBooks.

“Everything was being tracked manually through a lot of Excel workbooks. We would invoice through Word, which was a very manual process. Then we would run it through QuickBooks to track the invoicing against projects, but the clients often like to see certain information that QuickBooks couldn’t provide, so we had to come up with a manual way to do it.”

In addition to the master spreadsheet, each individual employee at ABS was required to maintain their own spreadsheet for hours worked, logging time against different projects.

“And then on top of that, employees had their own spreadsheet where they were tracking their hours because they have to bill to certain projects. If you work 8 hours in a day, and you’ve done 4 hours on one project and 4 hours on another, you have to track those 4 hours separately. It was daunting.”

Wasting time on busywork

Of course, these laborious processes ate into both Steve’s and Holly’s valuable time. Before Holly was brought onboard to manage this process, Steve, as President, was spending 5-6 hours every other Sunday working on project admin tasks.

“It’s the monotony - you change a cell here, you change a cell there, you forget to change it over here, and then you spend 30 minutes trying to remember what you did 7 days ago. It’s just the manual processes - when you have 4 people, manual process is fine, but as you grow, and you’re dealing with 60 projects or 30, it just makes things next to impossible.”

The Solution:

The status quo just wasn’t working, so Steve and Holly went looking for a new solution. They considered Productive, but ended up choosing Projectworks for its flexibility.

“We looked at a bunch [of tools], assessing from a high-level, but a lot of them didn’t fit our needs. We liked the customization of Projectworks more, and the reporting and templates for invoicing. It just seemed to fit us a little better with what we knew.”

Another factor that drove their selection was the Projectworks-QuickBooks integration, which allows users to sync invoices, expenses, purchase orders, and payments between the two platforms.

The Result:

• Streamlined workflows
• 22% headcount growth
• 12 hours saved every other week

By eliminating Excel and Word - both from project management, time tracking, and invoicing processes - Holly and Steve now save hours each week.

“Projectworks has saved us 12 hours a week, every other week. Both for time tracking and for invoicing - it’s a tremendous time saver for us.“

Since adopting Projectworks in June 2024, ABS has grown its headcount 22%, and the scaling related to people and projects was seamless. Looking into the future, Steve is optimistic about the company’s role in the industry. Professional services firms need to keep up with their industries as they evolve - and ideally even stay a little ahead of emerging trends. While it’s largely impossible to predict those trends over a long-term horizon, it’s pretty clear that AI will impact key technologies in the biopharmaceutical industry.

“There will always be a need for pharmaceutical and biotech manufacturing. The processes and technology will change some, but I see the projects staying relatively the same.”

The current size of ABS enables it to be fast and flexible. Leadership can make quick decisions, and the team enjoys the close-knit atmosphere. Their work has a major impact, contributing to the manufacture of life-saving medicines. At Projectworks, we’re proud to support their work and look forward to their continued success.

“We are helping provide medicines to people, whether it is clinical trial material or a commercial product that is readily available. We have to sit back and remember that what we do every day is important and we are making a difference to people who need medicines. That’s pretty impactful whether you're a 2-person company, a 200-person consulting firm, or a multi-national pharmaceutical company.”