Anugerah Pharmindo Lestari (APL)

Dannarjaya Harinta Sri

The 4^th Industrial Revolution has been disrupting various industries and our daily life. The pace of disruption, adoption of new digital apps is accelerating across all industries especially during the COVID-19 pandemic where automation and digital initiatives became high in the agenda of many businesses. With all the noise of market volatility, IT spending went up, virtual meetings and network reliability became a necessity, disregarding the “best” time to invest when market has steadied and is on a consistent upward trajectory.

PT Anugerah Pharmindo Lestari (APL), a member of Zuellig Pharma, is a leading Healthcare Distributor in Indonesia and is also riding the wave of this digital transformation and put digital transformation on top of its agenda. Digital solutions are being rolled out with the main objective is to ensure medicines, healthcare supplies and services are delivered faster with quality, across the thousands of Indonesia islands and 270 million people.

Recent number of COVID-19 positive cases shows rapid increase; hence healthcare industry will need to creatively disrupt and change current business processes to enable better engagement internally and externally with customers, patients, and other stakeholders. This includes the interaction of selling, buying, and paying products through online platform between Pharmacies, Hospitals and Pharma Distributor like APL. The overall Order to Cash, end to end Logistics will need to be simplified, automated, bringing agility into the organization through effective and efficient use of technology.

APL have embarked into digital transformation before the pandemic, by first setting a focused   organization to look after process improvement, namely APL Center of Excellence and appoint a Partnership and Alliance role. These two groups will have main responsibility of identifying process improvement within APL as well as seeking opportunities of partnership with other healthcare and technology providers, develop Digital Roadmap, execute the roadmap and nurture an innovation culture within the company.

"Healthcare industry will need to creatively disrupt and change current business processes to enable better engagement internally and externally with customers, patients, and other stakeholders"

APL plays a pivotal role in driving collaboration across the healthcare ecosystem in Indonesia. We recognized the fragmented healthcare ecosystem in Asia and the immense value brought by innovation and digital platforms in driving business growth of our clients and customers. Digital solutions delivered are to elevate the engagement between APL, clients and customers to the next level, then further extend to healthcare professionals and patients through our commercialization team. The crux of the digital tools we developed were to improve health outcomes of patients.

Digital transformation started by establishing a robust transaction system, SAP/HANA in a cloud environment back in 2018. This initiative built the foundation of all other digital initiatives, from Web Apps, Mobile Apps to Analytics for a much-improved user experience.

One of our digital products, named EzRX (read: easy Rx), a customer portal enabling Pharmacist to order online using web apps or mobile apps, and have e B2B capabilities to support higher order lines from Hospitals, Modern Trade and Clinics was launched at the end of 2019. Like any other online stores, customers are now able to point and click products they want to buy, make payments through the embedded payment gateway, track orders and product delivery as well as managing their account statements. The system has grown from a simple ordering platform into an integrated system, a conduit to other systems from SAP to salesforce mobile apps. Not only seamless interaction with customers, clients are now able to post product promotions on the apps and create more traffic for their products. The system will soon be transformed into a platform, partnering with other healthcare stakeholders, technology and fintech companies and becoming an ecosystem.

With the capabilities above, customers will benefit the virtual interaction with APL, able to transact 24/7, reducing the risks of physical contact and most importantly removing manual and administrivia tasks. In the area of cash collections, we are progressing with document digitalization to automate and simplify billing process, eliminating the use of paper documents as supporting documents for collection process and contributes to environmental sustainability.

Analytics, as mentioned above, also becoming an integral part of the business. They are the lighthouse of the business, providing on the spot and real time analysis of business performance, competition analysis, and as headlights of future business trends through the embedded machine learning feature. This capability is not only for internal APL but also for Clients and soon will be available for Customers. To ensure our stakeholders and business partners peace of mind, APL is certified with ISO 27001:2013, compliance to international standard for Information Security and Data Management system.