The pharmaceutical industry has seen significant growth in terms of research and development. Concurrently, it also faced numerous challenges such as; fragmented distribution network, lack of advanced infrastructure, high operational costs and strict manufacturing and distribution policies and regulations. For all those reasons, HO Group decided to implement SAP to reduce costs, increasing productivity, handle complexities and ease the process overall.
HO Group, is a leading and instituting distributor of medicine, medical cosmetics, and personal care in Egypt. This leadership prompted the group’s management to mandate the adoption of a technologically digital transformation system, to create an integrated business processes, culture, and customer experience to meet ever changing business and market requirements across its group of companies.
In 2020 and after extensive information technology research, aiming to serve procurement/sourcing, sales, human resources, finance and real-time foundation and more, management chose to serve the development of all stages of all those entities, by adopting and implementing SAP ERP with its various and core modules.
The adoption and implementation were segmented into four phases within the group:
Phase (1): HO Group of companies are the first companies in the market that provided its customers with automated invoices at a time when everyone else was utilizing manual invoices, and this was of excellent value to its customers in 1985.
Phase (2): The development within the group for continuous enhancement led to the establishment of B-Connect Company in 2004 to enrich the development of the pharmaceutical market and ease its unified business functions.
B-connect succeeded to automate 16,000 pharmacies across Egypt, in addition to the automation of HO Group of companies.
Phase (3): The huge development in the information technology arena created the idea of ERP “Enterprise Resource Planning” to consolidate an operating integrated system among all departments within the organization through one cohesive system. Choosing SAP over any other enterprise software was a winner because of all the advantages it provides to manage business operations and customer relations. We believe we have a pioneering role, we searched for the best and decided on SAP ERP.
B-connect pursued to become an SAP business partner in 2020, and this was the beginning of a long journey of three years, until it was accomplished.
HO Group, by its IT arm “B-connect” started to automate the first company of the group, “United Company for Pharmacists” (UCP) with the SAP Technology, in parallel with that, “United Company for Trade and Distribution” (UCTD) and FMCG, and Middle East Chemicals Company (MEC) entered the same path, and the automation began.
Phase (4): Our future vision of this technological development system adoption, enhancement and implementation, will most certainly manifest in the quality of services provided by the group to the Egyptian pharmaceutical market. This is our pioneering role, which governs the company to allocate financial and human resources for the development purposes.
