Excellis Health Solutions – An NNIT Group Company

NNIT has evolved quite dramatically over the years, from a small independent IT consultancy born out of Novo Nordisk to a publicly listed company and now an international group of companies in its own right. This article is the fourth in a series looking at the individual NNIT Group Companies – what they do and how they add value to NNIT’s purpose and aspiration of making a mark in business and society; bringing digital transformation to life.

Flourishing partnership one year into the acquisition
November 2021 marked the one-year anniversary of US-based Excellis Health Solutions joining the NNIT Group. The purpose of the union was to strengthen NNIT’s life sciences end-to-end supply chain consultancy services within the Pharma Supply Chain area with specific focus on the serialization and track & trace efforts globally. A lot has happened since the two companies decided to join forces in late 2020 during the height of the global COVID-19 pandemic, and a little more than a year later - as businesses and societies still face the aftermath of COVID-19 - the partnership between the two companies is starting to flourish.

When joining the NNIT Group in late 2020, Excellis CEO and Founder, Greg Cathcart highlighted that besides the strong cultural match and shared values between the two companies, he believed that by partnering up with NNIT, Excellis would have a greater opportunity to expand their business faster on a global scale

A little more than a year later, Greg is still confident that Excellis found the right match in NNIT: “One of the main reasons behind us joining the NNIT Group was to get a global footprint and help expand our business with a bigger team. By teaming up with NNIT and utilizing its vast portfolio of international customers, we have now been able to establish even stronger connections and attract more business outside the geographies we usually operated in. Also, by partnering up with NNIT, we experience that it is easier to get a seat at the table in big pharma, because many of the large customers already know about NNIT and their strong reputation within the life sciences industry.”

Collaboration between the companies
During the past years, NNIT has considerably grown its portfolio of end-to-end life sciences services organically and through acquisitions. Since 2018, NNIT has acquired five companies operating in the IT for life sciences space with the acquisition of prime4services as the latest addition to the steadily growing group of NNIT companies. From the beginning of joining the NNIT Group, Excellis has benefitted from being part of a diverse group of companies specializing in different areas of the life sciences IT value chain.

“We see synergies between the group companies, and we have joint efforts on different levels already, including combined selling and marketing activities. This is not only related to the other life sciences group companies such as Valiance and SL Controls, but we are also looking into how Excellis can offer our customers the ERP solutions and competencies provided by SCALES, which is another group company focusing on Microsoft solutions. We are stronger together and by combining some of our offerings and by tapping into our different customer portfolios we see a great opportunity to grow further and become more international,” says Greg Cathcart.

From four experts to 1,400 colleagues dedicated to life sciences
Excellis Health Solutions was founded in 2010 in Pennsylvania, USA by Greg Cathcart and three other partners who after many years of working in the life sciences industry decided to join forces after finding an industry sweet spot. Twelve years later, Excellis has grown to more than 80+ experts servicing and advising pharma customers in end-to-end supply chain solutions within serialization and track & trace. The majority of Excellis’ customers come to Excellis when they are in the closing phases of a clinical trial and expect to launch a product to the market within 18 months and need advisory on e.g., product packaging and traceability. It was exactly those sought-after competencies that made NNIT acquire Excellis after a rather fast-tracked process according to Greg Cathcart: “We already knew about NNIT and when we got news that NNIT was interested in us it only took around four months until the deal was signed. After some online talks with NNIT, Rasmus Koch Nelund and Rune Ringsholm Bergendorff from NNIT’s life sciences management team flew over from Denmark to meet us in person during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in the late summer of 2020. They knew what they wanted, and we knew what we wanted, and luckily the two objectives aligned neatly as we saw a lot of shared values and a joint aspiration to provide better services to our customers.”

Excellis has come a long way since its humble beginnings in 2010 with four employees to now being part of the NNIT Group that employs approx. 1,400 dedicated life sciences experts working to advise and service its more than 120 global life sciences customers.

You can read more about what NNIT is doing to support the global life sciences industry here: https://www.nnit.com/your-industry/life-sciences/

Read more about Excellis here: https://www.excellishealth.com/