CASE STUDY
Transforming customer data chaos into a strategic growth asset
A leading provider of drug testing devices plus lab and administrative services saw that rapid growth had created a maze of fragmented, duplicate customer records — and leadership were determined to clean it up.
Altus Nova led the charge to glean insights that could unlock new growth.
Premier Biotech grew so fast in a complex marketplace, the company wasn’t able to tell who their customers were or what products they were buying.
Altus Nova carefully untangled the web of customers set up different ways at different eras of growth, creating a robust model for relationship management.
Premier Biotech can now understand and manage its 3,000 unique customers with clarity to unlock new growth within existing relationships.
Premier Biotech
Premier Biotech is a leading provider of drug testing devices, laboratory services, and third-party administration (TPA) services, serving employers, clinics, and government agencies across public health, social services, transportation, law enforcement, and more.
But years of growth, evolving customer models, and incremental system modifications had left the company with a complex and fragmented customer data environment. As the organization prepared for a potential acquisition under private equity ownership, executive leadership needed a clear, reliable understanding of their customer base.
By partnering with Altus Nova, Premier Biotech implemented a Customer Master hierarchy that unified fragmented customer records into a single source of truth. The project transformed how the company understood and managed customer relationships, enabling better selling strategies, accurate reporting, operational clarity, and acquisition readiness.
We always prided ourselves on moving fast to capture the growing demand for our services. But at some point we had to face the fact that we were missing critical customer insights that would increase our value — not to mention remove friction and confusion from every aspect of the business. Altus Nova’s leadership through the data maze has been critical to building the future of our company.
”Challenge
Premier Biotech’s business model evolved significantly as the company grew. During the organization’s rapid 2018 to 2022 expansion, customers were set up one way — and from 2023 to 2025, they were set up another way. Each era introduced inconsistencies and duplications.
At the same time, Premier’s commerce solution had evolved far beyond a traditional ecommerce storefront. What began as a commerce platform was extended to become the day-to-day hub for revenue operations as an order management system and “ERP-light” backbone supporting the end-to-end customer experience.
Though evolving the commerce platform solved immediate operational needs, it also introduced long-term complexity. Over time, incremental customizations took Premier Biotech’s commerce solution off the software maker’s support path, ultimately adding up to significant technical and operational debt.
The result was a tangled customer data structure that left leadership unable to easily determine how many customers they had:
Customer records were created multiple times across different business lines
A “grandparent–parent–child” hierarchy was inconsistently applied
Customer entities were inconsistently setup as roles, accounts, divisions, and offices, making customers hard to distinguish
It was difficult to understand the difference between direct customers and resellers (also known as third-party administrators, or TPAs)
Data fields were partially implemented or captured inconsistently
Operational challenges stemming from this data maze slowed everyone down. Finance teams could not reliably produce accurate customer reports directly from the system. Instead, they extracted multiple spreadsheets and manually reconciled them through complex formulas and cross-checks.
Sales teams also lacked system-based visibility into customer relationships, often relying on personal knowledge and tribal memory rather than reliable data.
Perhaps most concerning, the system suggested the company had more than 15,000+ customers, when the actual number of unique organizations was far lower.
Discovery
Altus Nova immediately moved to provide Premier Biotech with development capacity and production support to stabilize the existing system while examining the existing architecture.
From there, the team conducted an intensive discovery combining business interviews, process mapping, and deep technical analysis of the application codebase. This work uncovered many disconnects between how teams perceived the system functioned versus how it captured and stored customer data.
With all the operational insights gathered, Altus Nova designed and implemented a Customer Master hierarchy that would serve as the authoritative system of record for all customer and customer-related entities.
Solution
The new Customer Master consolidated fragmented customer data into a unified model capable of representing:
Direct and reseller customers, as well as visibility into resellers’ customers
Engagement across business lines (drug testing devices, laboratory services, and third-party administration (TPA) services)
Sales territories and geographical breakdown
Revenue by sales rep, business vertical, customer and customer types, and products
Altus Nova then used AI-assisted tools to accelerate the data cleansing and mapping process, identifying duplicate records and reconciling inconsistencies across thousands of entries.
The result was a single, reliable global customer entity capable of rolling up all related operational data into a clear and accurate view of the company’s customer base.
Result
The Customer Master initiative fundamentally changed how Premier Biotech could understand and manage its customers.
What initially appeared to be more than 15,000+ customers in the system was revealed to represent approximately 3,000 unique organizations once duplicate and fragmented records were consolidated.
By unifying these records under a single Customer Master, Altus Nova reduced redundant entries by roughly 80%, giving Premier Biotech the first accurate, auditable view of its true customer base.
This transformation eliminated manual reporting processes, restored confidence in financial and operational data, and provided leadership with the clarity required to support acquisition readiness.
Key outcomes included:
80% reduction in redundant customer records (15,000+ → ~3,000 unique customers)
Automated reporting for finance and FP&A teams, eliminating complex spreadsheet reconciliation
Clean, auditable customer data, through standardized customer maintenance processes, to support due diligence and valuation analysis
Improved sales visibility, allowing teams to get customer insights from the system to guide growth within each customer relationship
Scalable data architecture and processes that allows newly acquired companies to be integrated without creating additional data fragmentation
The success of the Customer Master project led to a deeper strategic partnership between Premier Biotech and Altus Nova. Altus Nova now serves as Premier Biotech’s dedicated development partner, supporting multiple ongoing initiatives including acquisition data integration, warehouse and fulfillment optimization, and operational best-practice improvements.
The Customer Master also established the foundation for the company’s next phase of growth. As Premier Biotech grows through acquisitions, Altus Nova is evaluating the need for a robust ERP to enable both b2b and b2c commerce, multi-channel selling, and expanded logistics and fulfillment networks.
These initiatives will allow Premier Biotech to scale more efficiently, integrate acquisitions more easily, and continue strengthening the operational foundation of the business.
Altus Nova took the time to understand our challenges and delivered a custom solution that resolved critical data integrity issues while strengthening our systems. Just as importantly, they helped us establish the standards and safeguards needed to maintain data quality as we continue to modernize our product data, giving us confidence in our ability to scale and maintain our competitive advantage.
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