Established in 1935 in India, Cipla is a global manufacturer of pharmaceuticals, with a vision of providing world-class medicines at affordable prices. It manufactures more than 1500 products across 65 therapeutic categories. It currently operates in more than 170 countries, and had revenues of INR 104.8 billion (R24.35 billion) in the 2014 financial year. Cipla Medpro – the South African subsidiary – is one of the country’s market leaders in terms of both value and volume.
To ensure the smooth and efficient delivery of its medicines to clients all around the country.
Towards the end of 2015, Cipla moved to a new state-of-the-art warehouse facility in Table View, in the Western Cape, with the goal of ensuring that operations were transferred seamlessly with minimal downtime.
Long-time partner CQuential provided the intelligent warehouse management system that made the achievement of Cipla’s business goals possible.
“We need a warehouse management system flexible enough to meet our specific needs,” Joseph Ludorf, Supply Chain Executive, Cipla Medpro
In the world of large-scale pharmaceutical distribution, pinpoint accuracy is essential. From a regulatory perspective, medical products must be traceable down to the item – i.e. from the point of receiving through to sampling, positive release, all the way through to invoice. There are two reasons for this -firstly to trace a batch should it be illegally sold and secondly in case of a recall, or an enquiry from regulatory bodies requesting a re-test. Additionally, legislation dictates that samples from each batch must be retained for prescribed periods.
Assembling the orders – known as picking in the industry – is difficult because 98% of the distribution is a combination of both cases, plus fine picking. This makes picking orders very inefficient unless a system is in place, so it is vital that the warehouse is correctly set up to support operational efficiency.
It is important to understand that hundreds of orders are coming in daily – on each order there are many individual lines making the consolidation of efficient picking very complex. For example if one additional minute per item is introduced to a situation where thousands of items are being picked per day – costs escalate significantly.
At month end the warehouse can be extremely busy with in excess of 7,000 lines a day that must be picked, checked, and despatched. This painstaking attention to detail must, of course, be combined with the business need for efficiency and speed – at month end, the warehouse can be extremely busy with up to 600 orders a day.
The legal constraints around getting the right product to the right place at the right time are even more crucial in the pharmaceutical industry where we are dealing with: expiry dates; scheduled medicines plus quarantined medicines from overseas.
The company has developed a lite scanning system using scanners at despatch but there was no real integration into its ERP system – Sage Evolution. Crucially, there was no overriding system that would direct the warehouse operations in line with best practice and enforce required processes while integrating seamlessly into Sage.
The final step in the process is the handover of the assembled orders to the courier company responsible for distribution – a very labour intensive manual process.
Given the sheer volumes of Cipla’s South African operation and the large range of stock items, it was clear that achieving the dual goals of efficiency and accuracy required a flexible yet robust warehouse management system. Also, the company was determined to be able to offer market-leading turnaround times and customer service despite the fact that its Cape Town distribution centre was located far from other population centres.
Ludorf add: “We knew we needed a warehouse management system that was flexible enough to meet our specific needs, but robust enough to allow us to meet our targets for accuracy and speed.”
Cipla Medpro chose CQuential because it offered this combination of flexibility and strength, as well as the domain knowledge of its team. An additional point was the fact that, as a locally developed product, access to technical support was extremely quick and direct.
“The warehouse has been carefully designed to provide us with the perfect distribution hub,” Ludorf.
The CQuential team implemented the CQuential Warehouse Management System over a period of nine months. The first step was to conduct business workshops to document Cipla Medpro’s requirements, after which the system was suitably configured. A big part of the job was designing an interface with the Sage Evolution ERP, as well as with the IT system used by the courier company.
Product Executive, Stan Antonites, says it was challenging to introduce a new system and its allied process into an environment that had no previous warehouse management system experience. Cipla’s management devised incentive programmes to acquire staff buy-in and to drive the required personnel feedback via internal surveys on processes. They introduced a focused change management procedure. “The company’s executive taking a hands-on approach was vital to the success of the project,” says Antonites.
“A system like CQuential is only effective if the users embrace it, and we have to give Joseph and his team full credit for the imaginative and ultimately highly successful change management programme they put it together. Involvement at executive level is crucial to the success of change management implementation,” says Antonites.
The new warehouse management system was phased in across two sites, beginning with the inbound phase and culminating with the outbound at each one. For the duration of the implementation, CQuential placed its’ own industrial engineers on site to assist with change and handle queries.
Although CQuential designed to be delivered as a cloud service, in this case Cipla Medpro elected to have the software on premise. Billing, however, is done using the software-as-a-service model, giving Cipla Medpro the benefits of rapid scalability and cost effective monthly pricing dependant on level of use. The contract is backed up by a service-level agreement, with support offered remotely.
In addition, the implementation delivers 99.98 percent stock accuracy which was evident in their recent stock-take of a cycle turnover of approximately R600 million. This represents a variance in the order of approximately R3,500 which put another way, represents two small packets of high-end drugs.
This phenomenal accuracy greatly enhances Cipla Medpro’s audit processes, and assists it in complying with the various regulations that govern pharmaceutical suppliers. It also provides the necessary muscle to enable Cipla Medpro to bid for and win large national tenders, such as the R2 billion contract with the Department of Health to supply antiretroviral drugs for the South African government HIV/Aids programme from 2015 to 2017.
Another benefit is that the system now drives the process and represents the intellectual capital relating to warehouse management and distribution, a much less risky alternative to relying on the skills and memory of individuals.
Cipla has been growing strongly since the CQuential system was put in, and the system has proved capable of handling the increased volumes with ease while continuing to yield improved productivity and customer service.
“The result: A robust facility that allows for accuracy and speed whilst supporting the rapid growth of the business,” Ludorf
Towards the end of 2015, the company moved to a new, state-of-the-art warehouse facility in Table View, and CQuential helped ensure that the operations were transferred seamlessly with minimal downtime.
Steve Mallaby, CEO, CQuential, says this required a balanced approach that was cognisant of the need to keep the old warehouse operations and processes going while continuing to service customers but at the same time setting up the new facility, configuring the system to handle new, and different, processes and moving stock into the new facility. The fact that CQuential was in both facilities and they had intimate knowledge of the business operations was a significant factor in ensuring the success of the move to the new venue. “Moreover, in the month of the move of Cipla SA had its best month ever, so one can understand this increased volume in sales added additional pressure to the move, “ says Mallaby.
CQuential was also extensively involved from the early stages of planning, by providing the data which was utilised for the design and layout of the warehouse and racking systems, through to the mapping of the business processes in the new facility. Cipla involved CQuential from the concept phase throught the move to the finalisation of this major project.
Ludorf notes: The new warehouse has been carefully designed to provide us with the perfect distribution hub, but achieving all those efficiencies depends on the warehouse management systems’ ability to control incoming and outgoing stock with pinpoint accuracy, co-ordinate picking with the orders coming out of the ERP system, and ensure the right orders reach the courier. “All of this has to happen in an area that is as large as three rugby fields and with pallet stacks as high as 15.6 metres
“CQuential played a key role in enabling the move and continues to support our journey to get the right medicines to the right people at the right time,” Ludorf.
CQuential Solutions – a member of the Argility Technology Group – is a software development and services company that provides complete solutions for Supply Chain and Warehouse Management.
CQuential WMS – our sophisticated Cloud Warehouse Management solution, has been developed in-house by our team of highly experienced warehouse and IT management experts. CQuential’s globally competitive technology enables companies to transform their warehouses into strategic assets thus becoming an integral part of the supply chain. We work with customers to design and implement flexible, scalable, warehouse solutions that enable them to rapidly respond to ever changing operational needs. Our solutions – successfully deployed in South Africa and around the world – are suited to multiple warehouse environments from small to multi-national corporations and across multiple sectors from manufacturing, retail, chemical, food and beverage, to pharmaceuticals and logistics.
For further information visit our website: www.cquential.com
Or contact us on: Tel: +2711-712-1300
Email: info@cquential.com
