Modernizing a Legacy Application on AWS Serverless with Alcon

Founded in 1945, Alcon provides eye care products including eye drops, contact lenses, and surgical equipment to patients and providers around the world. With more than 75 years of product innovation and tradition, Alcon has been engaged in a company-wide initiative to modernize its offerings.

“The medical device industry is undergoing a digital transformation,” says Kenny Brown, Senior Director of Business Technology at Alcon. “As our competitors start to adopt digital solutions, it is not enough to provide the best products and services; we’re committed to providing the best digital offerings as well.”

Previously, Alcon’s sales representatives used a legacy tool with limited automation to configure surgical packs for their customers. Due to that tool’s complexity, many sales representatives manually created and changed pack definitions by contacting back-office staff. The legacy application was also built on architecture that did not interface with other critical systems, such as Alcon’s enterprise resource planning software.

Alcon needed to modernize the application and began exploring a solution on AWS. “We needed global availability, complete scalability, and a modernized interface,” says Botsford Hulen, senior architect at Alcon. “We had already built internal expertise and knowledge about AWS and what we could achieve on the cloud; once we defined our requirements, we selected AWS to support us on this journey.”

In 15 months, Alcon modernized its legacy application by adopting a serverless, microservices-based architecture fully deployed on AWS, called Custom Pak Designer. With this approach, individual service components can be developed, deployed, and scaled independently, which facilitates faster updates and global availability. The simple, web-based interface features thousands of products and over 10,000 different Custom Pak permutations, providing a centralized environment for sales representatives to create and configure Custom Paks. The application also includes complex underlying business logic that helps representatives select products according to specific surgical needs and regulatory requirements.

AWS Lambda, a serverless, event-driven compute service, handles the core business logic of Custom Pak Designer. Amazon API Gateway—a fully managed service that makes it easy to create, publish, maintain, monitor, and secure APIs at any scale—routes each user request to the appropriate AWS Lambda function. The function then processes the requested data and performs relevant actions, such as selecting items based on surgeon preferences and regulatory compliance.

Alcon also uses Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), an easy-to-manage relational database service, to manage data such as user configurations, order history, and product details. With Amazon RDS, the application can process complex queries and transactions that are crucial for the accurate configuration and management of Custom Paks. Amazon CloudWatch, a service used to observe and monitor resources and applications on AWS, tracks metrics and logs to assess the performance of both the microservices and the serverless components. If any issues arise, Alcon’s development team receives alerts in near real time.

Custom Pak Designer is now fully deployed globally. In Canada alone, 93 percent of representatives now use the application, compared to the 20 percent who used the legacy system. Globally, sales representatives now initiate 2.5 times more packs using the new system relative to the number initiated in the old system.

“The number of Custom Paks created by sales representatives in the field has more than doubled compared with our previous system,” says John Powell, global director of Custom Pak and consumables at Alcon. “The application was a difficult tool to use before, but now, it’s much easier. We’re creating new business opportunities on AWS.”

The application has also reduced the time spent on manual tasks and increased the productivity of both back-office personnel and sales representatives. Previously, data administration required 4–5 hours of work per week, but with the new system, this has been reduced to almost zero. These capabilities not only facilitate more accurate orders and pricing but also accelerate the onboarding of new representatives, as the system is far simpler to use. Additionally, the application contains detailed information for each product, empowering surgeons to make informed choices based on their unique needs so that they can choose the exact materials needed and reduce waste.

By modernizing Custom Pak Designer, Alcon has streamlined its process and improved the user experience. Sales representatives can focus on helping eye care professionals in surgery preparation, and providers can focus on performing procedures and helping people see brilliantly. Looking ahead, Alcon has the ability to expand the functionality of Custom Pak Designer with any number of potential enhancements.

“We’re now engaging with customers in digital ways, and we have an application that we can use to improve our Custom Pak products and services,” says Hulen. “With this foundational platform we have built on AWS, there’s no limit to where this application can go and the features that we can integrate.”