The proliferation in the Coronavirus cases has confined us to stay within. During the COVID-19 outbreak, e-pharmaceutical companies have experienced an unprecedented surge in sales across cities. PharmEasy founder, Dharmil Seth said that the company has experienced a 100% increase in the demand for e-medicines during the lockdown.
People who looked for brick and mortar pharmacies pre-quarantine now rely on e-pharmacies for medicine supply. After experiencing a rapid rise in demand for medicines, e-pharmacies are now concerned about keeping a track of these medicines. In one of the articles, 1mg owner Prashant Aggarwal discussed the inefficiencies of the supply chain pharmacy companies.
Challenges
1. Temperature Sensitivity of Drugs
Different medicines have different temperature sensitivity. When a medicine leaves cold stores they have to be kept under a controlled temperature. Various pharma companies lack temperature controlled refrigeration vans to keep medicines concentration values in place.
2. Tracking
Apart from managing temperature inside the refrigeration vans during the supply of medicines post-pandemic, e-pharmacies have to face challenges with the stock management and real-time tracking in last-mile delivery
Managing Demand and Supply of Pharmaceutical Products Including Medicines: with the current scenario, it is evident that post-pandemic the demand for medicines from e-pharma companies will increase. But the challenge here is to meet these demands. Various e-pharma companies lack a proper tracking system to track their stock.
Solution:
The Internet of Things (IoT) technology enables pharmaceutical companies to get real-time insights on their cold supply chain and make data-driven decisions. Iobot’s cold chain monitoring solution is built on Thingsup Platform that provides real-time insights and historical trends on the different data points in the cold chain including:
- Temperature and humidity
- Vibrations
- Geo-coordinates
Monitoring of cold chain assets (Genset, Air Condition Equipment, Power consumption) Tracking of these parameters ensures the pharmaceutical business never misses out on the critical details about the medicine supply chain at different storage and distribution points. Enabling IoT solutions enables pharmacy owners and stock managers to track entire supply chain details on their mobile phones.
Unit level Tracking: Inexpensive sensors provide a cost-effective solution that enables temperature tracking and logging at the unit level which helps in root cause analysis during cold chain breakdowns.
Real-time alerts: Real-time data from these sensors accessible via Thingsup platform helps stock manager/pharmacy owners to get immediate alerts on the breakdown. Actions on these alerts could potentially save millions of $ of loss.
Data-Driven Decisions: Machine learning applied to these data points with the Thingsup platform enables pharmacy companies to understand temperature trends, suggestions, and reduce operational costs.
Are you worried about the stock management of medicines or food storage monitoring at your cold-store chain? Feel free to contact us on sales@iobot.in for a free consultation.
