SEP
Build a Shared Understanding and Leverage Learning

At SEP, headquartered in Carmel, IN it’s the engineers not sales staff–who work directly with clients to streamline innovation and encourage collaboration. Since 1988, the company’s unique approach-building shared understanding, leveraging learning, eliminating waste, and building exceptional products–has been the forefront of the company’s culture, values and ideals.

As leaders in the agile world, SEP collaborates with clients in two major areas: software products, which are marketed to their customers and information systems to support business operations. They work in a broad variety of technology platforms, including embedded firmware, desktop, web/ server, and mobile.

“We start at the business outcome, said Raman Ohri, President, SEP. We try to understand the measurable outcome that our clients expect from their endeavor and drive that through a shared understanding to an actionable plan.”

SEP facilitates collaborative product discovery to help clients uncover the business case, product concept, and key success factors in formulating a roadmap for transforming an idea into a product. “Developing the right product absolutely depends on a close partnership with the client,” said Ohri. SEP scopes projects around principles, not a prescriptive process. They understand that one size doesn’t fit all, so using their experience with a wide variety of industries and business models allows them to be flexible in their approach.

Initially, the engineers at SEP were focused primarily on execution - the clients brought a set of requirements and the company built the products. As important as the technology is, SEP has found the biggest challenges come from rapidly changing situations and lack of clear vision on what product is truly needed. As such, the company added the capability to help clients quickly capture and validate their vision, so it could enact an actionable plan fast and start delivering value.

Over the years, the company has worked in many life science industries, including heavily regulated systems, health informatics, medical and laboratory devices and consumer facing apps and products. One global medical device company wanted to improve product safety of an existing ambulatory infusion pump in order to reduce programming errors by clinicians. The project involved developing communication protocols, coding, unit testing, formal software verification, and high-level and detailed software design. Each function was critical to meet government regulations and protect the patient’s safety. SEP’s solutions added functionality to support the transfer and storage of hospital-defined, therapy-specific, programming safety limits; increase usability through updates to the programming workflow; reduced device setup time by supporting electronic transfer of configuration settings from a desktop application; and provided documentation for 510 (k) submission to the FDA.

Developing the right product requires a close partnership with the client

“Moving ahead, we are building on our work and experiences to develop analytics,” said Ohri. “How do we get actionable intelligence from the vast amount of patient data streaming through the healthcare sector that we can trust and can use to inform behavior?”

Another step towards this initiative is SEP User Research, which helps to understand why users make choices and how they behave in their environment. Results of this research serve as inputs that help designers and businesses understand user behavior. “By analyzing data we can respond more effectively to user needs with innovative solutions,” concludes Ohri.