Inventory management for growing pharmaceutical businesses
Inventory and sales management is an intricate process, which includes several processes requiring monitoring. These comprise stock supervision and replenishment, inventory optimization, inventory analysis and reporting, order management, demand forecasting.
Inventory and sales management is an essential process, which helps instantly control critical parameters. Those comprise product shortage and overstock, expiration dates, shelf life, pricing, reimbursement, and more. When organizing day-to-day operations, pharmaceutical organizations must address multifarious challenges. Neglecting those might cause stock disparity, heavy workloads, employee dissatisfaction, and, respectively, reputational and financial damage.
When talking about mature pharmacy chains, those utilize large-scale platforms that have all-out functionality. Such solutions comprise modules, which cover inventory and sales management, accounting, marketing, prescription, compliance, analytics, reporting, human resources, customer support, and more.
But talking about beginning pharmacy chains, such all-embracing, large-scale applications do not provide value. They encompass excessive modules, are hard-to-navigate and way too expensive for young pharma businesses.
How to keep track of each stocked product
Prosperous organizations commonly allocate significant resources when approaching digital transformation. Such corporations usually possess experienced leadership, brand recognition, global presence, and have sufficient capabilities to implement advanced technology, for example, artificial intelligence.
Sure thing, mature businesses must implement large-scale platforms that provide comprehensive functionality. But does every business need such comprehensive applications or even computational intelligence to keep things working?
Described platforms usually include:
- Reference standards on substances
- Detailed descriptions of medicines
- Custom modules, which provide competitor analysis
- Analogue databases
These applications might cover:
- Inventory management
- Distribution management
- Accounting modules
- Marketing campaigns
- Contact and lead management
- Email integration
- Sales analytics
- Sales and demand forecasting
- Human resources
- Customer support
Given the numerous challenges young businesses commonly face — limited resources, great competition, dynamically changing regulatory requirements, licensing roadblocks — large-scale platforms seem inefficient. Beyond doubt, enterprise software sensibly optimizes several processes, but does also burden the personnel and requires significant investment.
We see the solution in implementing custom software mainly prioritizing inventory and sales management. Designed properly, customized software can be seamlessly connected to the National Drug Code Directory containing information about every pharmaceutical product being distributed in the United States and resolve everyday challenges associated with record processing.
The solution might include:
- Easy-to-navigate dashboards
- Organized contacts
- Inventory details
- Invoice information
- Analytic tools
- Reporting capabilities
And provide following features:
- Multi-tenant access for administrators, pharmacy supervisors, and personnel
- Completely automated data entry
- Inventory control (product tracking)
- Inventory replenishment (product statuses and notifications)
- Trend analytics
- Advanced reporting
Completely automated data entry
Biopharma manufacturers are required to provide responsible authorities with detailed product information. This means, responsible authorities — more specifically, Food and Drug Administration in this particular case — hold information about medicines being manufactured and distributed in the United States.
Pharmaceutical companies can implement custom software to obtain already processed product information. The concept’s quite straightforward: The software, directly connected to the National Drug Code Directory, might assist responsible personnel to extract relevant information by just entering the proprietary name.
Completely automating data entry might help quickly access:
- Package code
- Dosage form
- Labeler name
- Nonproprietary name
- Substance name
- Package description
The automation of traditionally manual workflows might respectively facilitate productivity and profitability. Routine automation reduces failure (incompleteness, absence, discrepancy, duplication), increases efficiency, and enables better resource-allocation.
Summing up
Computational technology is fueling every industry — healthcare and biopharma segments, retail, finance. Day-to-day operations — daily communication and cooperation between departments, data management, human resources, customer support, and more — are being increasingly automated.
The opportunities for those healthcare and pharmaceutical businesses moving towards digital transformation are wide-ranging, including automation, telemedicine solutions, predictive analytics, recommendation systems. Those automate manual workflows, reduce risks, increase efficiency, and enable data-driven decision-making.
Healthcare leaders are already moving towards digital transformation and incorporating:
Biopharma businesses are also actively utilizing digital innovation to streamline:
What’s next?
With dynamically evolving technologies, we expect those industries to achieve unprecedented results.
