Guo da Pharmacy: The "cure" for it's cloud computing

Although

is developing rapidly, the "ambition" of the national pharmacy is not limited to this. The goal of the national pharmacy is to become the first brand in China's pharmaceutical retail industry and to become a leader in the retail industry of Chinese medicine and health products. At this time, the state-wide pharmacy to pay attention to two issues: what are their own deficiencies, and through what means to achieve the planned development goals?


 

August 18, 2011, the Shanghai window of the drizzle to the original hot summer brought a trace of cool, but did not affect the meeting room heated discussion. The National Large Pharmacy Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as the National pharmacy) has ushered in a number of unusual guests, they are from the various industries of the CIO, their purpose of this trip is only one-learning country large pharmacy new on-line ERP system.

Based on the concept of cloud computing, the deployment of "small front, big backstage," the National Pharmacy and pharmaceutical retail integration platform to make guests, especially the pharmaceutical industry CIOs have a strong interest.

State-wide pharmacy for it "find medicine"

National Pharmacy is subordinate to the China Pharmaceutical Group Corporation under the Chinese Medicine Holdings Limited, its predecessor is the Shanghai state-owned pharmacy, was founded in 2001 only 3 stores. After 10 years of rapid development, by April this year, the national pharmacy stores network across 15 provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions, the number of employees nearly million, the number of stores also reached more than 1500.

Despite the rapid development, the "ambition" of the national pharmacy is not limited to this. The goal of the national pharmacy is to become the first brand in China's pharmaceutical retail industry and to become a leader in the retail industry of Chinese medicine and health products. At this time, the state-wide pharmacy to pay attention to two issues: what are their own deficiencies, and through what means to achieve the planned development goals?

Zhanggo, senior deputy general manager of National Pharmacy, told reporters that when the Chinese drug retail market concentration is very low, even by 2010, this situation has not been very good change, the drug retail industry, the first three strong sales accounted for the total market share of 5.76%. In addition, the entire pharmaceutical retail market in more than 390,000 pharmacies, single pharmacies reached more than 150,000. Industry is extremely dispersed, but also means that large chain retail pharmacies have great potential for development.

Meanwhile, for nearly 5 years, Guo da pharmacy through the integration of the medical retail chain of the group, its own new stores, as well as the acquisition of chain pharmacies, not only to achieve a rapid increase in the terminal stores, expanding the coverage of the regional market, but also achieved rapid development of enterprises and the doubling of sales. However, in such excellent results, the management of enterprises gradually show signs of inadequacy, the existing information support is also unsustainable.

Zhanggo said: "Some of these systems have been developed many times, adding a lot of personalized needs, some systems have no service providers, operation and maintenance problems." Although the system is generally relatively stable, but many subsequent development can not meet the needs of the current business. In addition, the use of different information systems by different regional companies has created multiple islands of information, with headquarters completing cross-regional data consolidation and the formation of Headquarters controls that are almost ' impossible ' tasks. ”

In view of this, the national Pharmacy management decided to report to the group, the regional companies of the information island of comprehensive integration, the establishment of an integrated medical retail platform, to achieve from the top of the specialization, integration, meticulous management.

Unique Retail system Design

The Integrative Medicine retail platform of the national pharmacy is not only the solution to the management problem of the large pharmacy in China, from the group point of view, the Chinese Medicine group hope that the reform of the national pharmacy to adapt to the development trend of the country's new medical reform, but also the integrated medical retail platform into the "Twelve-Five planning" of the group, to achieve the cloud strategy of the group.

China Pharmaceutical group Information Leading group, deputy leader of the group of Information Experts Group, Dr. Revan said, the original medical system under the pharmaceutical research and development, production, logistics, distribution are concentrated in large and medium-sized cities, and the new health care under the health protection population will be further expanded, The majority of rural market and the terminal market with Community health service institutions will be the main position of the competition of pharmaceutical enterprises. Therefore, the next development and competition, who occupies the terminal in the medical field who has the future.

To this end, the group of "Twelve-Five planning", made the information "155 project." That is, to create a cloud service platform, aggregate all business, to form a business, for employees, customers, partners to serve the center of cooperation, the establishment of integrated management, decision-making, integration synergies, shared services integration information platform, group integration industrial ERP platform, pharmaceutical logistics distribution integration information platform, International Business integration information platform, medical and health services information platform, the formation of information technology personnel security system, integrated portal and Information resources management system, information security system, information-based standard system, information management system.

The Integrative Medicine retail platform of the national Pharmacy is an important part of the "155 project" of the group. With the deepening of the new medical reform and the continuous expansion of the pharmaceutical market, the Chinese medicine group relies on the advantages of national pharmacy, which has placed great expectations on the retail chain business.

National Pharmacy integrated Retail ERP system, including retail ERP system, financial system, logistics system, front POS system, and BI system, constitute a set of enterprise finance, business integration information management platform. Through the construction of ERP, the state-owned pharmacy should not only clarify the definition of responsibility, but also solve the problem of express expansion and retail standardization, establish the core management dimension from strategy to operation, and complete the Management analysis report decision support. At the same time, the new system will also realize the concept of geographical management, including supplier location, organizational structure, warehouse to warehouse and other geographical management concepts are included in the system. The difference with traditional medicine retail store is that the system should realize the structure based on the legal person, realize 6-level, multi-dimensional assessment, and can carry on the free store combination in the system. In addition, the ERP system should complete the category classification based on the legal person, realize the classification unification, and break the legal person region restriction, can set up the area attribute in the commodity management, consider the area characteristic to carry on the unified management.

"Based on the concept of cloud computing technology, to achieve the standard front-end, centralized unified service, a strong background system." "Revan shows," Such system design is unique in the country, the state-wide pharmacy became the first in the field of pharmaceutical retail "eating crabs." ”

Cloud computing saves money

After clarifying the design idea of the new platform and the function and target of the new system, in 2009, in order to better build the new integrated retail platform, the demonstration group was born with the formation of the Revan, the information department, the law department, the audit department, the national large pharmacy and the unified coordination.

In view of the uniqueness and complexity of the new platform, the selection and tendering of the new system platform of national pharmacy are rigorous. The requirements of the software service provider and the implementation provider are very strict, not only from the company background, product maturity, total solutions, success stories, technical framework, implementation and after-sales service capabilities, and so on, at the same time, for the implementation of cloud computing technology, integration, pharmaceutical industry, business management concept, and the implementation of business framework , IT architecture, knowledge sharing and other aspects of the comprehensive consideration. After many rounds of competition and elimination, the national pharmacy finally chose IBM as the implementation of the first phase of its ERP system project.

"None of the domestic companies have been able to pass these standards before, and even experienced multinational companies such as IBM have encountered a variety of problems in the implementation process." However, it seems that our choice is still very successful, IBM has really done a good project. "As the general coordinator of the ERP project at the National Pharmacy, Revan recalls.

According to the design of ERP system software platform which has been tender, the system will be composed of two main parts, part is ERP core system, the other part is the POS system of the front-end store, while in the base platform design of data center, we need to consider two parts of hardware architecture design.

In the process of bidding for hardware support, the cost of hardware is too high. If according to the company's budget, the traditional hardware support method, the new ERP platform only a set of system support will need 15 million yuan, and 5 sets of systems down to at least 40 million yuan. Considering many factors, under the guidance of Revan, the company decided to use virtual server technology and physical server to support different software modules. Based on the concept of cloud computing system, the integrated data center and virtualization technology were redesigned to form a 9.1 million-yuan virtual hardware realization scheme, which saved more than 30 million yuan of capital investment for national large pharmacy.

In the new architecture, network and storage are centralized and support the use of each resource pool. The computing resources are divided into different resource pools according to different business requirements. This approach embodies the principle of centralization, maximizing the utilization of resources, improving investment utilization and facilitating centralized control.

It is understood that the whole system is divided into two areas: the first area is the production application area, the centralized deployment of ERP, POS and other systems of the application server. This area is fully virtualized with the IBM X86 application server, and the second area is the production database area. According to enterprise requirements, the database server selected the IBM power server, through the virtualization of the server, the company can deploy 4 sets of databases on a single server 4 partitions, improve IT integration efficiency, simplify IT management complexity. At the same time, the performance of power server not only greatly improves the usability of the whole system, ensures the continuous operation of the core database, but also reduces the investment of infrastructure hardware, and saves the huge cost of IT investment for the enterprise.

Small front desk Big backstage

After two years of demonstration, this March, the implementation of the new system, the implementation of the main data management authority, for the country's largest pharmacy in the future

The integration of strategic resources control laid the foundation for the use of system control to strengthen quality management capacity to upgrade the industry standards of compliance control, such as qualification, efficiency, batch number and other business operations of the entire life cycle of the management and early warning; changed the former national pharmacy each molecule company business information System is different, unstable, scalability is poor, To strengthen centralized and unified control of Headquarters, and to take into account the requirements of regional differential management, realize the integrated operation of retail business, support the integration of integrated management of the various industries and the synergy between the two industries; changed the consistency of the previous business financial data, the timeliness of poor, unified regional and Headquarters accounting rules, realizes the financial business integration management demand, has established the core business process and the financial process complete docking.

Zhanggo said that after the new system on line, from April to August this year, a short period of 4 months, the number of chain stores in the state-wide pharmacy from 1661 to 2000, compared to the past has a great boost. And the new integrated retail platform for this contribution is very large, "small front desk, big backstage" design from two or three months to a new one reduced to one or two weeks to build a new one, the rapid expansion of the state-wide pharmacy has played a very obvious role in promoting.

In the national pharmacy ERP implementation process, strictly abide by the group to the State control, and then to the country's large three-level strategic decomposition implementation, the formation of business overall planning and blueprint design. In the general meeting of the first phase project of the ERP project, Patrick, general manager of the country, said that the ERP project will become a milestone in the development history of the national pharmacy, through the promotion of ERP, the state-wide pharmacy will realize information integration and provide powerful information support and guarantee for the rapid development of the national Pharmacy in the future.

For the Chinese Medicine Pharmacy, the national Information integration platform, not only the background, management and service of the headquarters of the Chinese Medicine, formed a network layout with the headquarters as the center of support, at the same time for more than 1600 pharmacies to provide network services to achieve integrated management.

(Responsible editor: admin)