Client: DocMorris

Rethinking pharmacy, daring innovations, seeking dialogue – this success formula has made DocMorris the best-known pharmacy brand in Germany and at the same time the largest mail-order pharmacy in Europe. Since the company’s founding in 2000, the number of customers has been steadily increasing. Meanwhile, over four million people have ordered medications from DocMorris. As a pharmaceutical service provider, DocMorris develops and implements special chronic patient programs in collaboration with pharmaceutical companies and health insurance providers. In 2016, the turnover amounted to 331 million euros. About 600 people work towards the success of DocMorris, a subsidiary of the Swiss Zur Rose Group AG based in Heerlen, Netherlands.

Initial Situation and Challenge

At the end of 2015, DocMorris faced the challenge of wanting to launch major growth initiatives during 2016 and beyond. This would have also affected the ordering processes and involved IT systems through increasing sales and product volume. Furthermore, the previously used procedure was highly characterized by manual activities in the purchasing area, and would lead to possible bottlenecks with increasing volume, especially in the area of mass processing of SAP orders.

DocMorris Logistics (Source: DocMorris, Tobias Zeit 2016)

Solution

digatus analyzed the affected processes and work steps, as well as the IT systems used for them. These included both the initial SAP ERP system, which is used by purchasing and connected planning units for capacity and volume planning, as well as connected follow-up systems and applications and the associated activities. Using the results of the analysis as a basis, digatus developed an independent, virtualized software appliance as a prototype, which automated relevant work steps while simultaneously improving transparency of individual processes and optimizing data security. After a two-month agile development operation and continuous improvement and optimization, the appliance was then successfully transferred to productive operation, and obsolete legacy systems and processes were shut down and archived.

“Stable and efficient purchasing processes are the key to ensuring our inventory, and thus the smooth supply of our more than 4 million satisfied customers. With the software appliance developed by digatus, we are now able to process our future order volume more successfully in time and with continuous quality and cost structure!”

Michael Veigel – DocMorris

Customer Benefits

In addition to reducing risks through manual misoperation and simplifying work steps, it is now ensured that all relevant orders are successfully delivered to the respective suppliers in an automated manner. Feedback generated in the process (both manual and automated) is reliably recorded and automatically assigned to the respective purchasing employee for presentation and possible further processing. The time and effort resources gained today can be used in the future to successfully process significantly larger volumes, thus enabling optimization and cost improvements within the organization!