MSD (Merk)

MSD (Merck) company belongs to worldwide leaders in Health protection sector. It directs its efforts towards amelioration of human life. Pharmaceuticals and other products by ‘MSD’ in the sphere of health protection are being available on the market for more than a century.

In the framework of cooperation of our companies, ‘TQM Systems’ team executed writing of functional requirements, technical task and development from scratch of a web-application on sales plan creation on the basis of factual data from Sales, remaining stock on central warehouses and on distributors’ warehouses; as well as deriving data from sales goals volume-wise; types of products considered for sale during the consecutive periods; its further plan-factual analysis.

Project on automation of business processes of Sales Department of ‘MSD’ company.

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Aims and goals of the Project on Automation of ‘MSD’ (‘Merck’) company

Preliminary conditions before launch of project on automation were the following:

• Joint information database on products did not exist. Lots of time was spent to bring information on goods/products together in a single database from different sources. It was particularly the case when the data was recorded in different formats, under different names for the same product in different databases etc. 
  
• Planning process on Procurement and Sales forecasting was executed in Excel. 
  
• Different formats of reports on forecasting and factual sales by representative offices and distributors were manually summarized into a single report, owing to the need. That was very labour-intensive. 
  

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Stages of project on automation of sales forecasting of ‘MSD’ (‘Merck’) company:

• Writing of functional requirements; 
  
• Development of functionality; 
  
• Educating of users; 
  
• Transfer of a product for accompaniment to internal IT Department of contracting company. 

In the framework of functional requirements writing the nеxt business processes, that had to be automated by the web-application functions, were described:

• A list of distributors and their georeferencing; 
  
• A list of products; 
  
• A list of brands and categories; 
  
• A list of types of sales forecasting; 
  
• A list of sales segments. 
  
• Mechanisms of sales forecasting development as quantitative indicators; 
  
• Review and editing of factual sales; 
  
• Download of factual sales of distributors from different sources; 
  
• Download of factual distributors’ remaining stock from different sources; 
  
• Download of sales and remaining stock of factories of pharmaceutical companies from different sources; 
  
• A list of users; 
  
• Price-lists; 
  
• Recalculation of forecasting as money value indicators; 
  
• General reports; 
  
• Distribution of forecasting values of an upper level automatically to lower levels of detalization: analytics, participants and characteristics; 
  
• Settlement of mechanisms of discount setting and taking into account discounts depending on conditions. 
  
• Summing up modes ‘Net’ and ‘Discount’ into a forecasting window; 
  
• Blockage of forecasting lines in case of simultaneous change by several users.  
  

Project realization was executed according to flexible methodology of Scrum development. When describing functional requirements of a product we developed a test on functional check straight away. An example of logic behind development of one of the objects of a system is provided on the picture.

Besides realisation of key requirements of the contracting company, in the process of project implementation new program product was developed: web application Atom.PharmDist.

Atom.PharmDist. is a solution, dedicated for download of sales data form different sources; synchronisation of downloaded data and its analysis in various analytical perspectives on distribution of phramaceuticals.

Detailed description of the web-service, as well as demo version of the product: Analytical service for pharmaceutical companies Atom.PharmDist

Pic.1 An example of document ‘Functional requirements on development of automated system’. The client: ‘Merck MSD’.

In the process of project realization several levels of integration of IT system with other countries were executed. There was its own specifics of work with data and its own audit EGR systems in these countries. As of now, functionality, that was under development, was in the central database; specific changes were in other knots (local systems needed modernisation as well; API layer development for possibility of joint functioning in the framework of a new web-application - these types of work were executed in the framework of the described project). A fundamental scheme of work with databases looked approximately in the next way:

Pic. 2 A card scheme of integration of databases on different platforms of a central database and regional representative offices of the company

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Feedbacks regarding project on automation of ‘MSD’ (‘Merck’) company

An NDA regarding disclosure of project details and its technical realisation was signed with a ‘MSD’. On behalf of ‘MSD’ company, the management team of the Project:

Sergii Shkolnyk

Project coordinator / Discussion on concept of a final solution. Interaction architecture.

Kaskun Nataliya

Head of the Project / Project management. ФВ formation. Works validation.

Nataliya Smielaya

 IT-director / Resolvement of technical issues.

made by Yuliya Korgunyk, editor of TQM systems