Vendor Managed Inventory

Scenario:

A supplier would like to offer a vendor managed inventory solution to their pharmacy customers, an order will be raised, however only upon sale, will the invoice be raised. Additionally a supplier will need accurate stock and retail data, in order to optimally fill a retail site.

Some of the steps in this process could be done directly by the supplier, however third parties may better be able to provide this capability e.g. VNET.

Requirements:

• Orders, Invoices, Sales and Inventory Data

• Real-Time

• Multiple POS Systems

• Integration into your ERP / CRM

Approach:

• Utilize the PharmX Gateway for Orders and Invoices, and supplement with retail and inventory data.

• Have each of the POS systems integrated into DataSync

  • This requires each pharmacy to log onto the PharmX portal and accept into a data-sharing agreement with the supplier.

  • Each pharmacy needs to agree to share Retail and Inventory data with the Supplier, as well as connect for ordering and invoicing via pharmx.

• (Optionally) Setup a SQL Server Database at the supplier head office

• Connect to the Azure Service Bus deserialize the messages, and insert them into a database.

• Connect to the PharmX gateway to generate Orders and Invoices

Topology:

Process:

• Once the datasharing agreement is complete, the supplier will start recieving real-time messages each time a sale (e.g. POS or website sale) or inventory adjustment happens (e.g. recieving a new order from a supplier or completing a stock adjustment post-stocktake)

• The supplier will analyze the retail volume, and current inventory and send an order down to the store with several line items, the order can have the agreed price.

• The supplier will analyze the retail sales, and each time one of the items is sold, it will instruct the ERP to invoice this line item (preferably batching end of day, to avoid lots of small invoices).

• The ERP will send an invoice to PharmX, PharmX will deliver the invoice with payment terms to the Pharmacy.

• These messages are in a rich-object format (see catalog), they will need to be converted into a relational format (if using a relational database) for persistence. PharmX can provide some assistance here, as we do have some templates to help speed up the process.

Potential Issues:

• In order to understand some of the SKU’s being held and/or sold in the pharmacy, it may be necessary to enrich/cleanse the data, we would recommend subscribing to the CIS dataset for this purpose: Products, Prices, Promotions and Places. This will allow you to better lookup and match fields based on the data that you recieve.