Collaborative Management System Design Based On Vmi Pharmaceutical Logistics

With the competitive environment of market becoming fiercer and fiercer, it is necessary for enterprises to care about not only themselves but also upstream and downstream enterprises. The competition between enterprises has been transferred into the competition between supply chains. Under such circumstance, the integration of different enterprises is needed, triggering the integration of information flow and products flow among different enterprises. During the process of management, operators in enterprises gradually find that inventory control plays a critical role in decreasing supply chain cost and promoting service level. How to deal with problems of not only reducing cost but also promoting service level is the main focus of many enterprises. For the reason that the distributed VMI can realize the integration control of multi-inventory by sharing of inventory information, just fulfilling the needs of decreasing inventory cost with the premise of satisfying pharmacy distributors demands. Therefore, a collaborative integrated information system must be designed by utilizing VMI inventory management method in order to solve above problems. This kind of information system can achieve goals that enterprises may concentrated control multi-inventory sites, regulating logistic management process, mitigating employees'workload and improving service level and reaction speed of VMI logistic centers. It is helpful for pharmacy supplies and distributors to enjoy benefits of information sharing, improving logistic efficiency of whole supply chain.First of all, the current situation and problems which pharmacy logistics industry face is discussed in this paper, such as overstock of inventory, slow speed of replenishment and low efficiency of work. Also, the necessity of exploiting a collaborative integrated information system based on VMI is clear and definite in this paper. Based on these purposes, taking the development of a logistics management information system in a pharmacy corporation in Jiangsu province as an example, functions of the information system are further demonstrated, including processes of inventory management, purchase management and sales management. Then, the infrastructure of the collaborative integrated information system for pharmacy management is analyzed. Also, taking advantage of module method to design information systems and constructing structure chart are stated. This design divided the whole information system into different subsystems, among which dispatch and replenishment subsystem are emphasized. In addition, integrations of different information systems belonging to upstream and downstream clients are focused. Finally, the extension of the information system and benefits of this investment are described in the paper.