MKG Recruits Sphere
Optimized Event-Management Platform for Medical Knowledge Group
- Client
- Medical Knowledge Group (MKG)
- Industry
- Pharmaceutical Marketing
- Service
- Code Refactoring & Modernization|Python Migration|jQuery → React Migration|Performance & Reliability Engineering
Overview
Since 2004, Medical Knowledge Group (MKG), LLC has focused on building brand equity for many of the world’s largest biopharmaceutical companies. Through multi-channel marketing solutions, network mapping analytics, and patient-finding analytics, MKG enables intelligent data insights for physicians and other health-care professionals.
To reach the pharmaceutical market, MKG organizes and promotes medical conferences, gathering data on attendees, registrations, and activity for targeted advertising. iPad check-in and an iOS attendee-tracking app feed an internal, custom-built web-based event-management system that handles scheduling, billing, registration, sponsors, calendars, third-party vendors, PDF documents — and is customizable per conference with its own landing page.
What Was Slowing the Platform Down
Outdated Programming Languages
The system had drifted off mainstream tooling — outdated languages and frameworks made every change risky and every fix slower than it should be.
Bugs and Data Duplication
Years of patches without engineering best practices accumulated into a long tail of bugs and duplicate data across the registration flow.
Two-Minute Page Loads
Load times had ballooned to as much as two minutes — turning conference registration into a frustration for attendees and a credibility risk for MKG.
How We Solved It
MKG recruited Sphere Software to revamp the system. After evaluation, Sphere proposed three concrete moves and executed them in parallel — refactor the existing code base, debug the registration issues, and re-base the platform on engineering best practices.
1. Refactor and Modernize
Sphere migrated the application toward Python and from jQuery to React, optimizing the system for a better internal user experience. Code was refactored into a basic functionality package containing the essentials for conference tracking — clean, current, and easier to evolve.
2. Modular Campaign Customizations
Campaign customizations were stored in a separate repository from the mime module, so conference tracking could be upgraded independently and remain easy to support and modify in the future.
3. Debug Registration End-to-End
Several bugs in the conference signup and attendance flow were fixed. The two-minute load times dropped to seconds — a seamless experience for attendees and accurate data extraction back into the event system.
Key Outcomes
Load Times: 2 Min → Seconds
Excessive load times of up to two minutes were reduced to seconds after debugging — turning the worst part of the experience into the smoothest.
Operational Efficiency
"Because of Sphere, we’re now much more operationally efficient," said SVP of Digital Technology Tom Iannucci.
Future-Proof Architecture
Modular structure means upcoming campaigns and conferences can be customized without destabilizing core conference tracking.
Timely, Quality Delivery
"We were most impressed with Sphere’s timely delivery and quality of work. I would recommend them in a heartbeat." — Tom Iannucci.
The Results
Sphere refactored all code, fixed the highest-impact bugs in conference registration, and dropped load times from up to two minutes to seconds — a seamless experience for attendees and accurate data extraction back into the web-based event system. Sphere also went the extra mile by customizing event systems and associated landing pages and promotional websites for MKG’s upcoming events.
