Case Study: Biogen achieves FDA‑compliant scalability and a 40% reduction in support hours with OpenText

Biogen automates traditional manual processes to drive efficiency gains that improve performance in people, processes, and technology

Biogen, a Cambridge-based biopharmaceutical company operating in 80 countries, faced a critical challenge when its mission‑critical STARS application—which processes adverse event claims and must meet strict FDA SLAs—experienced problems during upgrades. New leadership pushed for automation and a hybrid infrastructure to improve people, processes, and technology, and the company needed to ensure the application could reliably support thousands of global users and avoid regulatory penalties.

Biogen tapped performance engineer Bryon Colaizzi and Micro Focus tools (Application Lifecycle Management, Performance Center, AppPulse Active) to extend a performance‑engineering framework, endurance‑test the application for 5,700 concurrent users, and adopt a shift‑left DevTestOps approach. The initiative enabled processing of roughly 900 safety cases per day, avoided potential FDA fines, cut support hours by 40%, reduced mean time to repair by 45%, improved application quality, and put 75 projects through an automated performance pipeline for ongoing resilience and compliance.

Biogen