The pharmaceutical industry has to deal with some genuinely complex challenges. Some processes like minimizing operational tasks and inventory management are common to most businesses. Others like deciding per unit product cost, carrying out material traceability, managing BMR/BPR, maintaining formulation, and monitoring expiry alerts are unique to pharma companies. 

Additional challenges include tracking material wastage, maintaining group-wise and warehouse-wise inventory, and keeping pace with changing government regulations. 

They also have to deal with real-time monitoring of developments in various branches, handling process integration and streamlining, and creating and maintaining pricing lists for different regions post Drug Prices Control Order (DPCO) expansion. Quality-testing of products based on stringent industry parameters, retesting those products, and complying with complex taxation processes in some destinations are to be handled with utmost efficiency too.

How Pharma Companies Are Dealing With These Challenges

Top pharma companies are fully geared to deal with these challenges and boost efficiency across diverse areas of operations within their business by investing in the best Pharma ERP software .

By deploying ERP, designed specifically for the industry, pharma companies can consolidate all critical records and analyze potential business opportunities . They can also easily integrate diverse industry processes such as formulations, routing, operations, costing and quality management. Result- they can make decisions faster, improve the quality of care, and reduce the cost of operations.

SAP Business One: The Preferred ERP for Pharma Industry

SAP Business One is an enterprise-ready solution that’s changing how pharmaceutical companies manage their business across the globe. Some of the key features of this highly acclaimed ERP, uniquely designed for pharma businesses, are:

Bi-Directional Material Traceability

  • Helps define the lot number of raw materials, intermediate products and finished goods. 
  • Makes it easy to track the expiry date of drugs against a given lot number during procurement and also from production. 
  • Helps issue inventory lots on a FEFO basis to the shop floor. 
  • The Lot Number puts operators in better control of the Lot movement process.

Batch-Tracking in WIP

  • Puts you in control of production processes.
  • Helps in proper allocation of resources for various processes.
  • Makes it easy to update work orders and reports when the status changes.
  • Helps in controlling batch production and carry out batch reconciliation at every stage.

Quality Maintenance

  • Record maintenance of various processes can be carried out with relative ease.
  • You can have a better grip on quality control and also control samples to manage complaints.
  • Registration of samples for RM/PM/Bulk/Semi-FG/FG becomes remarkably easier than before.

Quality Management

  • You can keep a watch on all stages of the procurement and production process.
  • You can separate suspicious and substandard items for inspection/disposal.
  • Allows you to generate labels for various tasks such as sample, quarantine, and under-test. 
  • Provides certificates of analysis for crucial tasks.

Formula Management

  • The ERP can support single and multi-level Bill of Material (BOM). This helps in better management of production-level formulae and routings. 
  • Calculation of yield and tracking (+/-) throughout production can be done accurately. 
  • The ERP offers conversion capabilities for multiple units.
  • Helps in the management of by-products of the production process and in maintaining the potency of raw material

Streamlining Production and Operations

  • Performing batch planning and auto-creation of any transitional production order become easy. 
  • Eases rework process, stage-wise yield calculation, defining routing/sequence for operations or stages
  • Helps in the stage-wise revaluation of product costing and its calculation. 
  • You can quickly track and manage formulation based on standard and supplementary requisition.

Regulatory Compliance and Reporting

  • Makes it easy to manage exceptional events by providing automated workflow and alerts. 
  • Offers forward and reverse traceability with automated recall features. 
  • You can perform security audit tracking, access archives of historical transactions & get electronic signature approvals. 
  • Helps define the process validation and also generates BMR/BPR report for GMP Compliance. 

Warehouse and Cost Management

  • Makes warehouse management simple for both multiple production and quality stages.
  • Ensures easy unit-wise management of the warehouses.
  • Allows tracking of direct cost calculation at the production process level.
  • Helps in cost management for rework production or quality process, costing & scrap management during WIP.
  • Provides inventory status, inventory ageing, and stock valuation at every WIP step.

Other Key Features

Other important advantages of SAP Business One for the Pharma industry are- it allows for material requirement planning, report generation, alert management, procedure approval, document management, DMS, mailing, SMS alerts and more.

Leading pharmaceutical companies are increasingly depending on SAP Business One to boost the overall efficiency of their business operations. It is undoubtedly the right ERP for driving productivity across the board. By deploying SAP Business One, pharmaceutical companies can recalibrate their business towards success and achieve their goals in no time.

Author's Bio: 

Being a versed blogger/writer, I Arif Rashid contributing my thoughts and knowledge through my content/blog. As a guest writer I love to write on Technology, Business, Startup, Education, Fashion, Home Decoration, Social Media trends.