A customized learning environment, built to grow with you
Sirius Medical trains its own team, customers, and distribution partners around the world through its own online academy. That academy ran on a standard platform with a custom integration to their CRM. In practice, that integration didn’t work properly, and on that same platform, they simply couldn’t meet their technical requirements—related to automation, UI, and UX.
In short
- Link sirius-medical.com
- Location Eindhoven, Netherlands
- Services Provided Web Application Development
About Sirius Medical
Sirius Medical is a medtech scale-up that develops surgical navigation technology for breast cancer surgeries: technology that helps surgeons locate tumors more accurately. The company was founded in 2017 as a spin-off from the Antoni van Leeuwenhoek (Netherlands Cancer Institute) and has grown into an international player with offices in Eindhoven and Scottsdale (U.S.) and both CE and FDA approval for its technology.
An organization like this is constantly training people: its own team, customers, and distribution partners worldwide. To that end, Sirius runs its own online academy—and that academy, in particular, was in need of a professional overhaul.
The situation: a standard platform that held back our ambitions
The academy ran on a standard platform with a custom integration to Sirius’s CRM. That was a great start at the time, but it couldn’t keep pace with the ambitions of a medtech organization scaling up internationally. The pain points we identified together were:
- The custom integration with their CRM was not functioning properly, resulting in unreliable data and unnecessary manual work;
- Their technical requirements for automation could not be met on the existing platform;
- In terms of UI and UX as well, they were constrained by the limitations of the standard platform;
- There was no central, reliable source of information on users, permissions, and progress.
For an organization that’s rapidly expanding internationally, that’s exactly the kind of obstacle you want to avoid.
The Approach: Prove It First, Then Build It
As a long-standing partner for website and marketing, we were already very familiar with Sirius. We pinpointed the pain points and first delivered a Proof of Concept: a detailed UX/UI strategy and a functional demo that demonstrated technical feasibility upfront—precisely in the areas where the old platform was falling short.
Building on that foundation, we deliberately opted for a compact MVP with a narrow scope: getting the core features live quickly, without complexity that isn’t needed at this stage. We delivered in four two-week phases, each concluding with a demo and a joint testing session. This kept the project predictable and within scope, while the architecture was deliberately designed to allow for seamless expansion later on.
The technology: a stable foundation with smart details
The academy is a central web application built on Laravel: a proven, widely used framework that provides a stable and secure foundation for years of future development. At its core, it includes everything a professional learning environment needs:
- training management with upload, organization by category, and version control, allowing you to choose for each update whether users must retake the training;
- Progress tracking via the xAPI standard, stored in our own database and viewable by user, by company, and by training course (step X/Y);
- user management with invitations, activation, and secure login, plus a reliable integration with Sirius’s existing systems as the central source of truth—exactly where the old platform fell short;
- reports and CSV exports, with a full admin panel to manage everything yourself;
- Automatic multilingual support based on the visitor's browser language, so that everyone can immediately view the academy in their own language.
Security is built into the foundation—SSL/TLS, CSRF protection, login rate limiting, secure sessions, and logging of administrative actions—and the application is fully responsive on desktop, tablet, and mobile devices.
The result: control, measurability, and ownership
Sirius now has a learning environment that works noticeably better and grows along with the organization:
- training sessions, users, and progress all in one place;
- Everything is measurable and analyzable, with the option to export data for your own analysis;
- multilingual and ready for international growth;
- a reliable integration with their own systems, without manual intervention;
- their own platform, expanding it at their own pace.
The benefits lie in ease of use, control over data, measurability, and ownership—precisely the foundation on which a fast-growing medtech organization can continue to build.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why choose a custom solution over a standard platform?
A standard platform offers a quick start, but forces your process to conform to the software. For Sirius, this ran into problems with an integration that was no longer adequate and technical requirements that simply didn’t fit within the platform. With a custom-built Laravel-based solution, the software adapts to the process, providing a single source of truth and the flexibility to grow with the business.
Will the academy be available in multiple languages right away?
Yes. The platform automatically switches to the correct language based on the visitor's browser language, and can easily be expanded to include additional languages—which is useful for an organization with users all over the world.
Can the academy be expanded in the future?
Yes. The MVP has a narrow scope, but it’s designed as a solid foundation that can grow with you. We add new features in short cycles, without having to rebuild anything, and since it’s your own platform, you’re not locked into anything.
Want to work smarter with custom software?
Do you also find yourself dealing with software that doesn’t scale with your business? If so, a custom web application is often the solution that restores peace of mind and control. Take the Growth Check and discover where your organization can see the greatest gains. It’s free, takes 30 minutes, and there’s no obligation.
