CASE STUDY
Sigma Healthcare: Running a healthy business
New B2B portal improves efficiency for pharmacy partners and helps them better serve patients
Challenge
Pharmacists, like family health practitioners, are often the first port of call in serving patients’ healthcare needs. As healthcare evolves to more patient-centered care, pharmacies will play a critical role in achieving successful outcomes.
The Australian pharmacy network, Sigma Healthcare, asked themselves: What can we do to help our employees and franchisees be more efficient and better serve patients? For Sigma Healthcare, this meant connecting healthcare solutions more effectively throughout the supply chain with digitized operations. The aim: Enhance and simplify interactions with pharmacy partners to unlock efficiency and agility.
Portal to the future
Sigma Healthcare needed to update their business-to-business platform, used by network partners for orders and accounts. The old platform had limited functionality and visibility into stock levels, promotions and customer-specific pricing. Sigma Healthcare collaborated with Accenture on a new online portal to improve the user experience for pharmacy partners so they spend less time online—and more time serving patients.
Strategy and solution
Accenture and Sigma Healthcare implemented a new B2B e-commerce portal with multiple self-service functionalities, responsive web design to cater for mobile devices, and a friendly user interface. The portal is based on SAP Hybris. Prior to the portal’s creation, a team from Accenture Interactive visited pharmacies to conceptualize the customer journey and experience for the new portal.
The portal serves as a one-stop shop where employees and franchisees can access their pharmacy reports, check promotions, buy or return products, check order status, and find stock in their region, eliminating the need to call customer service. Thanks to the Mulesoft integration platform, customer master data, product master data, price, orders, invoices, statements, credit return applications, and back-order reports flow to and from the company’s enterprise resource planning system in real time. The solution incorporates analytics to help drive Sigma Healthcare’s promotional strategy and new site functionality.
"We are excited to provide our pharmacy partners across Australia with a new one-stop, secure ordering and account management platform. This is modernizing the way pharmacies can order their stock to ensure that their customers are always well serviced."
– JEFF SELLS, Executive General Manager – Retail Pharmacy, Sigma Healthcare
Creating a customized experience
We worked closely with Sigma Healthcare to support their complex pricing scheme. Pharmacy partners also see a customized interface to their specific store brand and can purchase custom combinations of assorted deals.
4000
branded and independent stores with approximately 10,000 employees will be able to connect with the new portal.
64M
price combinations are continuously updated so that end users can make accurate purchase decisions in real-time.
Transformation
Thanks to the one-stop ordering and account management portal, Sigma Healthcare’s pharmacy partners now have more time to focus on customer care and service. The new tool gives pharmacy owners and their staff greater visibility into real-time, personalized trading prices, promotions and stock levels, making the user experience quicker and more efficient.
In addition, they can now:
- Manage mandatory product allocation for pharmacy brands, eliminating the use of fax and manual data entry.
- Easily and quickly search products under multiple classifications.
- Receive back-in-stock notifications for products that were out of stock.
- Request credit returns for faulty products or delivery issues.
- Manage orders, back orders, invoices and statements, reducing manual activities performed by the customer services team.
- Work from a customized home page for their banner store brand, as well as see specific prices for their account.
- Check discounts for volume purchases.
- Create multiple users for the same pharmacy as well as users with different permission levels of access, improving compliance.
- Access multiple pharmacy accounts through a single login with the ability to easily switch between different accounts.
The data captured in the system is helping Sigma Healthcare better understand market dynamics, the needs of pharmacy partners and consumers, and what drives those needs so they can better match them. This is helping Sigma Healthcare react quickly to market changes and offer an improved service for employees and franchisees. With the newfound efficiencies, pharmacy partners can run stronger businesses and support healthier local communities.
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