When ProPharma Distribution outgrew QuickBooks, President Levi Ellis and IT Director Charles Snyder initially implemented Microsoft Dynamics GP and CRM. The strategy behind this solution had been to quickly address specific business challenges with perceived best-of-breed solutions. Unfortunately, as the company grew and evolved, the set-up proved to be too complex. Even worse, the systems didn’t talk to each other, requiring high labor costs for manual change management.
eConnect was added to pass orders from Dynamics CRM to GP to the warehouse. Daily down time issues with eConnect were prevalent. “We couldn’t get a consistent flow of business transactions because the information was in different applications, and downtime prohibited process momentum,” Snyder says.
Adding to the order processing headaches, ProPharma also needed to track every medication making sure every unit of drug from the point of manufacture and supply chain to ProPharma and then out again can be traced. It’s an FDA requirement known as Pedigree tracking that ProPharma managed as a manual process.
FDA Pedigree tracking is known for its complexity, essentially a supply chain of custody—the chronological documentation of the control, transfer, analysis, and disposition of physical pharmaceutical medications.
ProPharma uses a unique sequence of numbers to tag the product as it comes into their warehouses, a number that sits on the receipt side of the software. They print out a Pedigree tag with a bar code, and then when the medication is picked from the warehouse, someone manually types the number into the invoice, Snyder explains.
Imagine entering in 20-digit numbers for each of what could be 10 to 20 medications. With any such manual system, there is human error, which must be caught and corrected.
Spending far too much time supporting all the different elements of the business as well as contending with daily downtime, Ellis and Snyder worked with Mark Mynatt of DCAA Solutions, an Acumatica partner, to conduct an audit of the aging, unreliable system. “The upgrade path to get everything fixed was crazy complicated,” Mynatt says. “I told ProPharma that if there was a hiccup in the system, the whole thing could unravel.”