Montefarmaco OTC finds the right medicine with IBM and Gruppo G.R. Informatica

Italiano

Montefarmaco OTC, based in Bollate, near Milan, is one of the key players in the Italian market of over-the-counter pharmaceuticals and healthcare products. The company delivers its products nationwide to around 12,000 local pharmacies, generating up to 40,000 sales invoices every year.

This mass of documents has to be processed, filed and stored for a number of years in order to comply with a variety of Italian regulations on the traceability of pharmaceutical products. The company is also hoping to achieve ISO 14000 environmental management certification, which also requires a considerable degree of documentation on internal processes.

With just 50 staff at headquarters and 40 in the sales network, Montefarmaco OTC was finding it increasingly difficult to manage all this documentation using traditional paper-based processes.

“Finding an individual invoice was a slow, tedious process,” explains Luca Caramella, ICT Director at Montefarmaco OTC. “We had to send someone to the filing room to physically look through the cabinets and find the document. Moreover, we were physically running out of space. We would have needed to take over another room just for more filing cabinets if we had not decided to move to a computerised solution.”

Building on IBM technologies

Montefarmaco OTC consulted Gruppo G. R. Informatica, an IBM Premier Business Partner specialising in document management and business process solutions. The company chose to deploy G. R. Informatica’s InteGRa.Documenti software to handle the whole information lifecycle of its various documents.

“All documents are now saved into the InteGRa.Documenti repository, which stores data on our existing IBM DB2 Workgroup database platform,” explains Luca Caramella. “The application runs on IBM WebSphere Application Server, which has also been part of our IT infrastructure for some time.

“The fact that InteGRa.Documenti utilises these IBM technologies was a key factor in our decision – not only because it extends the value of our investment, but also because the stability and usability of WebSphere and DB2 gave us confidence in the solution.”

He adds: “Often when we implement new software, we have to spend considerable time and money on retraining. But because we are so familiar with WebSphere and DB2, InteGRa.Documenti was easy to learn.”

The extreme scalability of the DB2 platform, combined with its exceptional performance, mean that the InteGRa.Documenti will be able to grow as Montefarmaco OTC’s business needs and data volumes increase. Montefarmaco OTC estimates that digitising its storage with DB2 and InteGRa.Documenti will reduce storage and administrative costs by around 50 per cent.

Meanwhile, the flexibility and interoperability of the WebSphere middleware has enabled the integration of the new solution with an ERP system, and will help with the company’s next project – to open up the InteGRa.Documenti system to Montefarmaco OTC’s network of suppliers.

InteGRa.Documenti

The solution from Gruppo G. R. Informatica not only makes it easier and faster to file, store and access documents; it also helps to run cost analyses and calculate expenses. Built-in workflows are helping to spread best practices throughout the organisation, and ensure that standardized processes are followed by all employees – reducing the risk of documents being incorrectly processed or mis-filed.

“InteGRa.Documenti makes it so simple to keep track of our documents that it is hard to imagine how we ever managed without it,” says Luca Caramella. “Whenever we need to find an invoice or contract – whether for financial purposes or to demonstrate compliance with regulations, we have access at the touch of a button.”

He concludes: “By taking advantage of the scalability of DB2 and the flexibility of WebSphere, Gruppo G. R. Informatica has delivered a superb document management solution – one that will play a key role in Montefarmaco OTC’s business operations for years to come.”