Restoring Stability and Confidence in a Composable Future
How Orium helped a global biotech leader recover performance, restore stability, and explore the potential of their composable platform.
As one of the world's leading providers of biomedical research products, Santa Cruz Biotechnology had taken an important step forward by replatforming to a composable commerce architecture. While the move established a strong digital foundation, early technical challenges led to inconsistencies in performance and user experience. Realizing the full value of their investment required additional expertise, so Orium was brought in to strengthen the implementation— ensuring their composable platform is built on best-practice implementations, enhancing customer web experiences, instilling confidence in the long-term stability of their new architecture, and empowering internal teams with greater control over content and campaigns.
The Challenge
Ensuring Santa Cruz Biotechnology could achieve their goals meant addressing several key issues that were limiting the performance and stability of their newly composable architecture.
The initial implementation had introduced inefficiencies that caused site instability and impacted both customer experience and revenue, with ecommerce performance declining after launch. Compounding this, limited observability and monitoring made it difficult to detect or resolve problems before they affected users, leaving the team reactive rather than proactive. Additionally, some core SEO and accessibility fundamentals hadn't yet been fully realized, and the mobile experience—critical to SCBT's global audience—was underperforming in speed, usability, and visibility.
Alongside these issues was deeply embedded complexity: the platform depended on multiple interconnected systems, including SAP, Contentful, commercetools, and MongoDB, all managing high-volume product data. Without an internal development team, SCBT was relying heavily on external vendors to manage updates and fixes, which made maintaining stability and momentum more challenging. To move forward confidently, they needed an expert partner who could take ownership of the platform, restore performance, and establish the foundation for long-term scalability and growth.
"The team is responsive and provides good direction. Implementations are interactive, where the Orium team provides beneficial insights in helping us determine appropriate website improvements. We are confident they understand issues we bring to their attention and impressed with their quick resolutions."
The Strategy
Orium's approach centered on three phases: stabilize, support, and scale. The goal was to enable Santa Cruz Biotechnology to regain control of the platform, resolve the urgent performance issues they were facing, and lay the groundwork for long-term growth on a reliable, modern foundation.
The first priority was to establish stability. The Orium team conducted a comprehensive review of the platform—covering code quality, site performance, SEO configuration, and accessibility—to identify root causes of instability and performance degradation. With those identified, the next step would be to implement monitoring tools to provide visibility across systems and begin resolving the highest-impact issues immediately, including critical cart and checkout bugs affecting conversions.
Once the platform was stabilized, the focus would shift toward optimization and empowerment. The team would prioritize improvements that would directly contribute to revenue recovery, including mobile performance, on-site search, and CMS usability. By enabling internal teams to manage content and campaigns without relying on developers, Santa Cruz Biotechnology would be able to act faster and operate with greater confidence.
Above all, the engagement would reinforce the MACH-aligned principles and agile delivery practices their initial composable implementation lacked, ensuring each improvement strengthened the platform's flexibility, reliability, and business impact.
The Solution
Once engaged, Orium moved quickly from assessment to action, stabilizing the platform, restoring key business functions, and putting systems in place to prevent future disruption.
Stabilizing the Core Platform
The team began by resolving the most pressing issues impacting site performance and reliability. Critical checkout and cart errors were identified and fixed, restoring conversion paths and stabilizing ecommerce operations. At the same time, code optimizations and dependency cleanups improved deployment consistency and reduced the risk of regressions.
Infrastructure Optimization and Cost Efficiency
Orium restructured Santa Cruz Biotechnology's AWS environments to enable smoother, more predictable deployments and reduce operational overhead. Security was strengthened through SSL updates and configuration hardening, while standardized tagging and labeling across environments improved traceability and simplified ongoing maintenance.
Implementing Observability and Monitoring
To address the previous lack of visibility, Datadog was integrated across the platform, providing real-time insights into performance, uptime, and catalog processes. Automated alerts were configured for critical services, ensuring that the Santa Cruz Biotechnology and Orium teams could detect and respond to issues before they affected customers.
Enhancing Performance and Scalability
A key deliverable for Santa Cruz Biotechnology from the outset was measurable improvements in site speed and backend efficiency. Code refactoring reduced technical debt and improved maintainability, while infrastructure adjustments helped the site scale more reliably during high-traffic periods. The result was a faster, more stable experience for users and an easier platform to evolve over time.
Empowering Internal Teams
Finally, Orium was able to strengthen Santa Cruz Biotechnology's operational control by improving their Google Tag Manager configuration and optimizing CMS workflows. These changes allowed business and marketing users to launch campaigns and manage content updates independently, reducing reliance on developers and accelerating time to market.
Together, these initiatives transformed Santa Cruz Biotechnology's composable platform from a source of instability into a scalable, observable, and performance-driven foundation ready to support continued growth.
Outcomes & Next Steps
With the platform stabilized and key systems operating reliably, Santa Cruz Biotechnology regained the confidence and control needed to advance their digital commerce goals. Infrastructure improvements and monitoring tools brought new transparency to performance and uptime, allowing issues to be identified and resolved before they could disrupt business. Code and deployment refinements reduced instability and technical debt, while front-end and SEO optimizations began driving measurable improvements in traffic and user experience.
Equally important, internal teams gained more autonomy through a simplified CMS and better marketing instrumentation, enabling faster execution without technical bottlenecks. Santa Cruz Biotechnology now operates from a position of strength, supported by a more efficient, scalable, and insight-driven composable architecture.
