The pharmaceuticals industry today faces a wide array of challenges. The business environment has been characterised by a proliferation of both increasingly large companies, and the emergence of small, highly-specialised competitors.
The industry, with annual revenues of $150Bn per year in the United States alone, faces rising competition, primarily due to lowering barriers to entry, expiring patents and the adoption of innovative research techniques. Because of this, companies need to continuously find new ways to maintain their competitive edge.
Increased R&D costs and marketing overheads are a factor alongside an environment of lowering profitability, and lower spending from both governments and employers. This has increased pressure to establish process / system efficiencies and lower the overall cost base.
Regulatory pressure and litigation are becoming an increasingly present factor - pharmaceutical companies are being asked to be increasingly open and to lower prices. This, combined with increasing difficulty and costs of finding and developing new drugs has resulted in a drive to establish new ways to enhance competitive advantage and profitability.
From a non-technical perspective, the following approaches have been suggested:
The Pharameuticals industry today faces the following factors:
The adoption of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) technology is a common way to integrate and streamline an organisation. Improved information flow and alignment of procedures provides a firm backbone to achieving key objectives, for example:
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) technology enables the organisation to integrate and streamline procedures. Example benefits include:
At Orchid we have a capability within this industry, best demonstrated via involvement with a number of highly successful ERP implementations.
The Orchid team have worked on regional and global roll outs and upgrades, automated warehouse management, supply chain management, electronic batch records, compouter system validation, ROI project work and user training.