Inventory management in a medicinal products wholesale warehouse

Inventory management in a medicinal products wholesale warehouse

Oral presentation

Margarita Krаsteva, Ivan Lalovski
Faculty of Chemistry and Pharmacy, Sofia University “Saint. Kliment Ohridski”, Sofia

Inventory management in a medicinal wholesale warehouse is an important and complex process. Pharmaceutical companies engaged in the wholesale trade of medicinal products work with a large number of unique codes for different medicinal products. In the warehouses of Sopharma Trading, this number exceeds 20 000, which makes their tracking and control almost impossible. Having such a large assortment of products poses a challenge to the control of their inventory and flow in the wholesale warehouse for medicinal products. To deal with these tasks, Sopharma's warehouses have 3 main systems with different functionalities - 1. SAP; 2. KNAPP; 3. LITIS. SAP is responsible for checking the inventories in the company's central warehouse, regional distribution center (RDC) Sofia and RDC-Varna. The program provides an opportunity to check the time of receipt and discharge of the products. The robots are programmed with KNAPP, and the system is specific for the robots in the warehouses of RDC-Sofia. A certain capacity is set for each robot depending on the medicinal product and the program tracks the product’s inventory. LITIS is a browser program that provides a forecast of future sales based on various factors. Such examples are sales from previous months or last year’s same time period, which is very useful for seasonally oriented products. The successful use of the three systems proves their utility in terms of physical and accounting control of inventories in warehouses and the flow of medicinal products. This makes them a major tool of optimizing work in wholesale warehouses.
Keywords: medicinal products, wholesale warehouse, management