Unifying 7 Locations Into One Platform — Saving $1.9M Annually

The Challenge

A national laboratory network had grown through a series of acquisitions, inheriting 7 different technology platforms across 5 states. Each acquired laboratory brought its own systems, configurations, and workflows. The result was a technology landscape that cost $3.2M annually to maintain and provided no unified view of the business.

The operational impact was severe. Staff trained on one system couldn't work at another location. Reports from different sites couldn't be compared because they used different metrics, formats, and definitions. Every location had its own IT support requirements, its own licensing costs, and its own training programs. Duplicate licenses across the 7 platforms were burning cash, and the IT team was spending the majority of its time maintaining compatibility rather than improving operations.

Previous consolidation attempts had failed because the scope was too large, the timelines too aggressive, and the migration plans too risky. Each location was running production workloads that couldn't tolerate extended downtime, and the technical differences between platforms made a simple "lift and shift" impossible.

Our Approach

DxLogic designed a 14-month phased unification project that prioritized continuity over speed. Rather than attempting a single "big bang" migration, the project moved one site at a time, validating the process at each step before moving to the next. This approach meant no site ever experienced more than a weekend of transition downtime.

The first phase established a standardized platform configuration — a "master build" that incorporated the best practices from all 7 existing systems. DxLogic worked with operational staff at each location to understand their specific workflow requirements and ensure the unified configuration could handle all of them. Compromises were minimal because the master configuration was designed to be comprehensive rather than lowest-common-denominator.

Each subsequent phase migrated one or two sites to the unified platform, with DxLogic engineers on-site during the transition to handle edge cases in real time. Centralized reporting was built incrementally — each migrated site immediately appeared in the unified dashboard. By the time the final site was migrated, leadership had been using the unified reporting system for nearly a year and had already identified cross-location optimization opportunities.

The Results

Annual technology costs dropped from $3.2M to $1.3M — a 59% reduction that saved $1.9M per year. All 7 sites now run on a single unified platform with centralized management, reporting, and support. Key processing turnaround time improved by 38% as best practices from the highest-performing sites were standardized across the network. The project paid for itself twice over in the first year of savings alone, and the operational improvements — staff mobility, unified reporting, simplified training — continue to compound.