How Vimedimex Aced the Pharmaceutical Market in a Hotbed for Business Opportunities Like Vietnam
Vietnam is the second-largest pharmaceutical market in Southeast Asia, and Vimedimex is one of the largest players in the nation. Founded in 1984, Vimedimex has grown from strength to strength as a pharmaceutical drug maker, wholesale distributor and medical supplier in Vietnam, with an annual turnover of US$800 million.
Vimedimex’s wholesale and medical supplying arm serves 80,000 pharmacies scattered across 700 cities and 63 provinces in Vietnam, serving 10,000 communes and wards. To meet the increasing market demands of its customers, Vimedimex needed a system that would adhere to high industry standards for the traceability and storage of drugs during distribution.
Vimedimex also needed a solution that would deliver real-time data regarding its pharmaceutical products’ transport and storage conditions. Vimedimex needed a solution with a robust application programming interface (API) that would enable it to integrate with devices and smart sensors, in addition to being able to analyse and give immediate warnings to manage drug quality well. In short, Bravo, the solution that it was using before was just not able to scale to accommodate the growth Vimedimex was experiencing.
With technology innovation, digital technology application, and customer experience at the heart of its digital transformation initiative, Vimedimex chose the Oracle NetSuite cloud enterprise resource planning (ERP) system and worked with SuiteCloud Vietnam (PointStar Consulting Vietnam) as its implementation consultant.
Vimedimex’s commitment towards digitalising its business and priming itself for growth was underlined by its decision to bring its entire operations under Oracle NetSuite through the implementation of a comprehensive set of modules that included order-to-cash, procure-to-pay, financial management, warehouse management, fixed asset management, multi-company management, and business analytics.
The proof is in the pudding, and for Vimedimex, the sheer numbers illustrate the success of its large-scale implementation of Oracle NetSuite. It has experienced a 99% reduction in human errors from manual entry of data while achieving 100% accuracy in inventory and real-time data. There has been a 30% reduction in inventory turnover time and a staggering 95% reduction in accounting errors.
Other observations represented by huge numbers since Vimedimex implemented Oracle NetSuite include a 65% reduction in the financial close time, a 52% reduction in goods returned, an 89% reduction in time spent preparing management reports, and a 60% time reduction for sales order processing.
Oracle NetSuite has helped Vimedimex with a multi-channel customer information management system, in addition to providing integration for its transport management system, electronic invoice system, and with Salesforce. Oracle NetSuite has also helped integrate Vimedimex’s e-commerce platform, CEVPharma.
The success of a digital transformation project, such as the implementation of Oracle NetSuite is also highly contingent on the consultants or vendors that a business chooses to work with. Vimedimex has been richly rewarded for its decision to work with a leading regional financial digital transformation consultancy such as SuiteCloud Vietnam (PointStar Consulting Vietnam).
“Partnering with SuiteCloud (PointStar Vietnam) was a key factor in the successful implementation of automation initiatives at Vimedimex, while Oracle NetSuite has helped us automate labour-intensive, manual tasks and helped streamline our business processes, reduce costs, and improve our bottom line,” says Le Xuan Tung, General Director, of Vimedimex. The company has also revealed plans to implement Oracle NetSuite in its factory by the end of this year.
