Life Science CDMO

Turning scattered spreadsheets into a real-time project portfolio

How a European life sciences company gave its internal project managers one structured, connected way to plan, track and report every project

CONTEXT

Our client is a European contract development and manufacturing organisation (CDMO) serving biopharmaceutical customers, and part of an international group. Operating in a highly regulated environment, the company relies on a dedicated technical department to run the internal projects that support its operations and growth. Within this department, a team of internal project managers leads cross-functional initiatives involving internal experts, sponsors and external contractors. As the number and complexity of these projects grew, management wanted a more structured way to select, plan and monitor them, along with a reliable portfolio view to support decision-making.

KEY CHALLENGES

No consolidated portfolio view. Each project lived in its own set of files. Management had no single, up-to-date view of status, timelines, budgets or risks across projects.
Spreadsheet-based project control. Schedules, budgets and changes were tracked in separate Excel workbooks, each built differently. Preparing reviews meant consolidating information by hand.
File exchanges with external partners. Collaboration with contractors and external stakeholders relied on emailing files back and forth, with a risk of outdated versions and limited traceability.
No common governance standard. There was no shared process to submit, approve and launch new projects, nor a common way to report on budget deviations, changes, decisions and risks.

01

CLIENT

Biopharma (CDMO)

02

Industry

Healthcare & Life Sciences

03

Organization Size

Established organisation with 300 employees Subsidiary of an international group

Our Assignement

Approach

Requirements from both sides. We gathered needs from department management (dashboard, health indicators on scope, time, budget and quality) and from project managers (planning, budget and risk tracking), to serve both steering and execution.
Portfolio-first architecture. The solution spans three workspaces (Portfolio, Projects and Archives), each with role-based access for administrators, project managers, sponsors, leadership and, where needed, restricted external collaborators.
Governed project intake. Any employee can submit a new project through a single form. Management approves or rejects each request based on scope, budget, timeline and priority, assigns a project manager, and notifies the requester automatically.
Reusable project blueprint. Every approved project starts from the same template: project plan, budget tracker, a shared log for changes, risks and decisions, weekly status update, team register and dashboard.
Real-time roll-up. Key metrics from each project automatically feed a portfolio dashboard, so the department sees health, progress and budget across all projects without manual consolidation.
Iterative design and handover. Test projects let the team challenge the setup and share feedback, simplifying interfaces — the budget sheet in particular — before launching real-life testing with a user guide.

OUTCOME

One source of truth for the portfolio. Leadership now has a consolidated, always up-to-date view of every internal project’s status, timeline and budget, replacing reports that used to be compiled by hand from scattered spreadsheets and emails.
Consistent project execution. All projects share the same structure, indicators and reporting, which makes them easier to compare, review and hand over between project managers.
Clear governance from day one. A transparent intake and approval workflow, with automatic notifications, ensures that only assessed and prioritised projects enter the portfolio, with a project manager assigned from the start.
Better budget control. Planned versus actual costs and forecasts are tracked per work package across every project, giving the department earlier visibility on deviations and more time to react.
Structured collaboration and traceability. Changes, decisions, risks and issues are logged in one place, and external partners work in the same environment with controlled access instead of email attachments.
Scalable and audit-ready. New projects are created from the template in a few guided steps, and completed, cancelled or on-hold projects move to a dedicated archive kept for compliance and audit.

PLATFORM

Built entirely on Smartsheet. The whole project and portfolio management environment described above — workspaces, intake form, approval workflow, project blueprint, portfolio dashboards and reports — was designed and delivered using Smartsheet, leveraging its forms, automations, cross-sheet links, reports and dashboards.

Why Smartsheet. More broadly, Smartsheet is a work and project management platform that organisations use to plan, automate and report on their work from a single, familiar spreadsheet-like interface. It is generally recognised for helping teams replace scattered files and manual reporting with shared, real-time visibility, for automating repetitive steps such as approvals and status updates, and for scaling from a single project to a full portfolio without heavy custom development — which is broadly in line with what made it a fitting foundation for this engagement.