LACAR MDx

Align the R&D team and boosts project delivery by setting up a Project Management Office

CONTEXT

LaCAR MDx is an innovative Belgian biotechnology company specialising in molecular diagnostics. The company develops, manufactures, and commercialises fully integrated solutions—combining CE-IVD reagent kits, laboratory instrumentation, and dedicated software—that simplify and accelerate genetic analysis for medical laboratories worldwide. Originally, the R&D team tracked projects manually across spreadsheets, emails, messaging tools, and slide decks, leaving teams without a unified view. As the diagnostics business scaled, such kind of fragmented project tracking led to lost visibility across project and task dependencies.

KEY CHALLENGES

Fragmented project tracking — Projects were tracked manually across spreadsheets, emails, messaging tools, and slide decks, leaving no unified view of timelines, risks, or dependencies.
No consolidated decision-making data — As LaCAR scaled, the organization lacked reliable, centralized information to support prioritization and deadline management.
Cross-team misalignment during execution — Departments weren’t always in sync; products sometimes launched before other teams (e.g. marketing) were aware, delaying customer communication.
Slow propagation of priority shifts — When market demand changed priorities, those changes didn’t reliably reach operational staff in time, making it hard to adjust plans and reassign work.
No resource/capacity visibility — LaCAR couldn’t assess the impact of reallocating people between projects, making resourcing decisions largely guesswork.

01

CLIENT

LaCAR MDx

02

Industry

Healthcare & Life Sciences

03

Organization Size

Emerging and SMB (1-199 employees)

Our Assignement

Approach

Discovery first, tool second — we mapped LaCAR’s actual project management workflows, decision points, where information broke down between teams. Then, we defined what a structured PMO should look like for LaCAR specifically — clear phase ownership, responsibilities, and dependency tracking from feasibility through product launch. Finally we proposed Smartsheet to be use as collaborative work management platform.
Co-built the project kit blueprint with the R&D team, then validated it on real work — The Smartsheet project kit blueprint was designed together with end users rather than handed over pre-built, so the platform reflected how the team actually worked. This was then stress-tested through a three-project pilot and adjusted based on what held up.
Transferred ownership and built in mechanisms to sustain it — We finally trained the team to run the new PMO structure independently and brought the wider team up to speed, while introducing a recurring project scoring review and a two-tier reporting (Project and Portfolio) view so the structure keeps working as LaCAR business scales.

OUTCOME

~50% reduction in meeting time — R&D and Validation meetings no longer require pulling information together manually from multiple sources.
Real-time portfolio visibility — Timeline changes now cascade automatically; if development slips, the validation team sees the downstream impact on launch dates immediately.
Informed resource planning — LaCAR can now assess the impact of reallocating people between projects and better judge pipeline capacity — previously impossible to quantify.
Standardized, transparent workflow — Every project now moves through a clearly defined, owned structure from feasibility to launch, replacing ad hoc tracking.
Full internal ownership — LaCAR PMO independently manages and scales the Smartsheet setup, with Digital Flows adding refinements as needs evolve.

Noté 5 sur 5

” Digital Flows team deeply understands our industry, which meant they could quickly grasp our needs and respond to very specific questions. Smartsheet is intuitive and highly automated, which makes day-to-day work much easier. We now use Smartsheet for all our R&D and Validation meetings, and because we no longer have to pull information together from multiple sources, we've reduced meeting time by around half.

Louise Debry LaCAR MDX PMO