Summary:
The Indian pharmaceutical industry is today the fourth largest globally in volume terms and 13th largest in value terms and continues to grow annually at 14%. The industry is making significant IT investments to support this growth.
This paper surveys the IT usage in the Pharma industry. It describes the opportunity in the market, the gaps that the Industry is facing currently in the services offered by IT Service providers and how the Industry is coping with these gaps. The paper concludes by highlighting the expected benefits that Industry will obtain by outsourcing their IT needs to Service Providers.
Overview:
Pharmaceutical companies need to keep up with their constantly changing industry dynamics to stay viable and competitive. Pharmaceutical companies face the challenges of simultaneously reducing costs, increasing revenues, improving operational efficiencies, shrinking drug pipelines, patent expiration, getting new products to the market faster, lowering supply chain costs, driving brand awareness and consumer loyalty, and meeting regulatory and security requirements.
With these growing challenges, Pharma companies are compelled to adopt the advanced and latest IT technologies and automation levels to stay ahead of the competition. The role of IT is not limited to only being a supportive tool for operational activities, but also to be a strategic tool as well as a major enabler for organizational change, improved quality, and cycle-time reduction. IT solutions allow these companies to tap into their huge databases and deliver easy-to-comprehend insights to improve business performance and maintain regulatory compliance. Not only the large Pharma companies, but small and medium scale enterprises (SMEs) are also realising the importance of IT and using it in one way or the other.
Indian Pharmaceutical industries are using IT across various functions like Production, R&D, Quality, Supply Chain, Finance, HR and Sales & Marketing. However, R&D, Supply Chain and Sales & Marketing are the three functions where usage of IT becomes critical as the huge amount of data generated by these verticals and complexity of their business processes.
