Life Elixir

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the director of information solutions at Cryoport, a cold chain logistics agency. We have multiple clients in three different domains. We’re in the biopharmaceuticals, animal health, and IVF services.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Life Elixir?

We needed data leveraging and consulting services.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Life Elixir is helping us work and get some results on data science projects. We’ve been trying to get an understanding of how we can leverage our data to get meaningful information out of it to reduce the manual labor hours people spend troubleshooting an issue or trying to prevent an issue.

What is the team composition?

I only work with the owner.

How did you come to work with Life Elixir?

They were hired before I joined the company. The owner was hired through a third-party agency at some point, and, after that, he expressed a desire to work as an independent consultant. We now work directly with him through his company, Life Elixir.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in June 2020, and the work is ongoing. He probably began working with the company a year before I joined.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

We have metrics that speak to the impact of their work and early indicators that point to the success of this project. It’s not in the production environment. I can’t really say how much it helped, but the test environment and stage environment where we ran the dry run for the data science project were very positive.

How did Life Elixir perform from a project management standpoint?

The owner is professional. I haven’t had any issues working with him. He’s good at communicating priorities in terms of project management and other aspects. We communicate via email, phone calls, and Zoom calls.

What did you find most impressive about them?

He’s reliable. I can count on him to deliver what he says he will. Life Elixir has proven themselves to be very reliable.

Are there any areas they could improve?

When it comes to communication, I’ve had some struggles making sure that he communicates in a manner that the other stakeholders understand. It’s great that he can speak in technical terms and in a detailed expert subject matter. 

However, when it comes to people who are not as up to speed as him, he needs to come down to the client’s level to make sure they understand what he’s trying to communicate.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Create a very detailed statement of work and make sure that the deliverables are well understood by Life Elixir and the people that they’re engaging with. Have the acknowledgment from the team that there’s no lack of clarity in terms of what the deliverables are.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the owner of an automation platform for digital assets and a radiation detection product.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Life Elixir?

Unlike current dosimeters, we have a product that collects data in real-time, every 60 seconds. We needed to create a time series model to make sense of this data. We have a cloud platform but needed to read the dosimeter and provide two-digit scores on the screen.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

We provided Life Elixir with sample readings from our tools. They created a mathematical model and analyzed time series based on the readings. Their team fortified the model in Python to plug into our draft platform. Essentially, they created an AI software to implement in their model given our data and provide a score. It’s a black box function for us.

How did you come to work with Life Elixir?

We had a working relationship prior to this project

How much have you invested with them?

We spent $1,000 on Life Elixir’s services.

What is the status of this engagement?

Life Elixir worked on this project between May–June 2018. We may have more work for Life Elixir if the third-party testing comes back saying the product needs to be calibrated.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement? 

Life Elixir’s work is functional and reliable. The model will be useful in third-party testing, which is about to commence. A scoring system that we can implement in the product and bring to market’s small, but a crucial piece of the whole puzzle.

How did Life Elixir perform from a project management standpoint?

We collaborated via Skye or Slack and communicated via Skype or Slack daily. For project management, we used Redmine or JIRA. Life Elixir was fast, turning assignments around quickly. Their team was responsive. In the past, I’ve worked with people who wouldn’t respond for three days, which is useless in this day and age.

What did you find most impressive about them?

I trusted and believed in their abilities, so there was little risk engaging Life Elixir. Their team had knowledge of healthcare, which helped a lot. We worked together cohesively.

Are there any areas they could improve?

There’s nothing to improve right now.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

This isn’t specific to Life Elixir. Know your goals and have data to support those goals. People come up with ideas and expect AI to execute it magically. AI is basically advanced statistics, so there needs to be an understanding of data science and how it is inputted into a model. You need data, a goal, and an idea for a product. Any data science project is susceptible to failure if you don’t know what you want.