India’s SaaS-based pharmacy management solution provider Pharmarack is working to address core trade challenges within the pharmaceutical industry by enhancing data catalogue consistency across stakeholders including stockists, chemists, and pharmaceutical companies.
It aims to digitise the pharmaceutical ecosystem to improve the ease of transactions and efficiency throughout the value chain.
Pharmarack’s chief data and analytics officer, Arundhati Kshirsagar, told iTnews Asia that within the Indian pharmaceutical supply chain, disparate versions of products at each point, including 250,000 retailers and 12,000 distributors, complicates the mapping process.
This manual task was error-prone and decentralised, posing a challenge to managing the supply chain digitally and performing analytics on the data, she added.
The company explored solutions from various vendors and evaluated potential "build" options with partners.
It decided to adopt Informatica's AI-powered IDMC (Intelligent Data Management Cloud) platform due to its data management capabilities and a successful proof-of-concept, Kshirsagar said.
The company uses Informatica’s SaaS solution intelligent MDM (master data management) – a part of IDMC - on AWS.
According to Kshirsagar, its previous attempt to merge over 12,000 unique independent catalogues manually presented a challenge in resolving data catalogue inconsistency and achieving a unified view.
With MDM, the company can address an industry problem related to catalogue quality in online and offline marketplaces.
It equips Pharmarack with the scale to handle over 300,000 SKUs (stock-keeping units) across 37 thousand brands, catering to 250,000 chemists, druggists, and over 12,000 distributors.
Enhance catalogue quality and efficiency
Kshirsagar said Pharmarack aims to tackle problems for the industry by offering small and medium businesses with catalogue quality comparable to that of giant e-commerce players.
She said the solution could be used by over a million chemists and stockists to harness the potential of digital technology without concerns about catalogue consistency.
This is expected to improve the availability of medicines, reduce wastage due to unsold medicines which reach their expiry date and enhance efficiency in the value chain.
Pharmarack (formerly AWACS) has extended its digital transformation efforts beyond data management, involving the digitisation of purchase invoices to streamline the manual entry process associated with inventory management,
This reduces manpower requirements, minimises errors, and ensures distributors save time during purchase processing.
Recognising the lack of standardisation in invoice formats across distributors' ERPs, Pharmarack has developed a unique format which is compatible with ERPs, said Kshirsagar.
