Oxford Pharmacy Store Success Story

Summary

Oxford Pharmacy Store (OPS) specialises in wholesale and distribution of prescription medicines and other pharmaceutical products to National Health Service (NHS) hospitals and other health care providers across the whole of the UK.

Challenge

What was your problem, and what challenges prevented you from easily solving the problem?

We had a paper-based quality system that became too hard to manage as we expanded. Also, sometimes, customer complaints would be forgotten about as someone misplaced the paper file. So we tried to share files electronically with secured files sharing and sending emails to the persons who were concerned but that also became unmanageable. The approvers got too many emails and it was impossible for them to follow all the tasks. We needed to have a dashboard that would concentrate all in one place, so we started looking for a digital QMS solution.

How did you find out about our solution? Did you consider other providers? What criteria did you use to select BPA and Microsoft?

The person in charge of finding a new solution had already used Trackwise in a previous job but found it ineffective and clunky. Also in a previous position in a hospital, he saw how SharePoint was very effectively used to manage tracking document. So when he found out that the BPA QMS was based on SP, he knew this would be a great solution for all his requirements.

The webparts fit the requirements of pretty much everything OPS wanted. We had a very selective criteria of being able to not only store but manage and work live with each document in the complaints, collaboratively. BPA Solutions allows us to do all that.

What was the implemented solution? How did it address your challenges?

We used a lot of standard features in BPA but being able to customize it was crucial to us in order to meet our very unique QMS needs.

So we highly customized the complaints feature. The ability to process the complaints much faster in a SharePoint environment increased the quality of the relationship with our customers.

As we deal with high price products, they must not be off site for too long: time is such a critical factor with us so saving time saves money.

The complaints are logged by the customer service department and the quality department follows and treats the complains: the collaboration between teams is much more effective as well since we use BPA.

Strategy

How did you implement the solution? How long did it take?

The solution was implemented mainly by one person who was the direct contact with BPA for the trainings, adjustments and feedback. Then the Quality team tested the solution. Having only one point of contact was also very beneficial because all was centralized.

It took 8 months to be able to integrate the archaic paper system into the solution and in one year it was running smoothly.

We started from a fresh canvas on a specific date and never had the 2 systems running together.

We were able to easily import the lists of products and of customers.

The main challenge we faced was the way the workflow should work. What worked for a paper-based process could not always work for a digital solution so we had to rethink and redesign the workflow. But in doing so, it became more efficient and much quicker.

Results

What results did you gain from BPA Solutions – both anecdotally and measurably?

We don’t have the data but we know we saved a substantial amount of time: we have been able to prevent delays in customer complaint processing and we have no risk of customer being forgotten about, as happened sometimes with the paper-based system.

We don’t have the figures yet but we know BPA also helped us on a cost saving point of view : there is a significant amount of products that are no longer being thrown away because we are able to deal with the customer complaint swiftly. We can now save the products and prevent them from going to waste.

Having a QMS integrated in the Office365 platform made it so much easier for the users because, with the SSO and the connection to other applications they were already familiar with, the training required was reduced to a minimum.

Was there anything spectacular about how easy it was to deploy or engage employees.

The IT team was extremely happy about the ease with which the solution was installed and deployed. They did not need additional resources, and as it was rapidly done, no additional pressure fell on them.