How Government and businesses will benefit from shared drug supply IT system

Today, budget procurement and retail chains represent two completely different segments of the pharmaceutical industry, as they differ in their approaches to doing business, pricing and software. Each company generally creates an individual software product, depending on its own priorities and business specifics, as there is no one-for-all ready-made solution. Even well-proven platforms, such as 1C shrug off some subtleties in the pharmaceutical market and need significant adaptation. To put it differently, if a retail distributor chooses to enter the government-budgeted drugs segment, it will have to create a completely new program from scratch. As a result, we get several multidirectional systems that cannot be synchronized with each other or scaled.

A common IT system integrating processes of both the budgeted and retail markets would be a solution, indeed. Such a product should pay regard to the specifics of those segments and their varying approaches to storage warehouses, procurement practices, nuances of product deliveries to customers, and contrasting entry points into seemingly identical business processes. Integration with the drug labeling system is of course a sine qua non of launching such a solution. Generally, this implies creating a large-scale omnicompetent pharma software product that can be further adapted to changing market realities, for example, on the 1C platform.

The main barrier to creating such an IT system is writing technical specifications. They need to be formulated on the basis of a process-oriented approach and existing high expert assessment. In other words, we need to clearly define algorithms for a distributor’s financial and business processes, taking into account the existing legal regulations, pricing practices set in the market, and coordination between departments, i.e., tenders/bidding, procurement, CRM, logistics, etc. In most cases, that is beyond the capabilities of suppliers’ commercial divisions.

The main issue is, however, that staff is not always committed to the systematic and process-oriented approach to doing business. Managerial decisions are often based on intuition rather than on structured analysis. Employees have difficulty systematizing and documenting existing business processes, do not see systemic patterns and ignore optimization altogether. A company may lack someone with a holistic understanding of all of the company’s business lines and the ability to understand how they relate to each other.

Launching such IT solution should involve developing process thinking among employees of companies’ commercial departments and add the ability to describe business processes, see patterns, and analyze in KPIs. Moreover, it is crucial to build cooperation between departments, encourage knowledge sharing and win-win dialogue. Finally, it is advisable to select responsible employees with an end-to-end view of corporate processes to enable cooperation with IT experts on a regular basis. This approach will create a whole pool of talents to be involved in the development of an industrial IT solution.

The idea of ​​a common software product is in line with international trends and will eventually cluster the entire pharmaceutical industry together.