IT can be an useful tool to transform Indian pharma industry

Mumbai, Sep 14 (UNI) The new drug controller general of India (DGCIL), Dr M Venkateswarlu who assumed his office early this month, today said that the Indian pharma industry was poised at an inflexion point where it can transform itself from being a largely domestic generics player, into an aggressive global participant and information technology (IT) can help a lot in achieving the goal.

Inaugurating CII Pharma Summit, 2006, here he said, ''It is being increasingly felt that technology can help play a vital role in releasing to a large extent, the financial presure build up on the pharmaceutical industry''. IT can help the industry in achieving a twin advantage as it can be used as a driver for innovation and in standardizing and streamlining business processes and improving access to information between departments to help boost productivity and lower costs, he said.

Talking about the initiatives being undertaken by the Centre in this direction, Dr Venkateswarlu advised the industry to go for IT-driven things like enterprise resource planning (ERP), sales force automation, supply chain optimization, web-enabled customer and vendor management and customer relationship management tools for the same.

Releasing CII-KPMG study on 'Indian pharma Inc : Competing Globally' which was also the theme of today's summit, on the occasion, the chairman , national committee on drugs and pharmaceuticals and chairman of the summit, Ajay Piramal, hoped that the summit would provide a roadmap for the industry to implement technology solutions and to identify issues which would help the sector in competing globally.

The deputy chairman, CII western region and CMD, VS Dempo and Co Shrinivas V Dempo, rued that the expenditure on the Indian pharmaceuticals industry was merely two per cent of the industry's turnover and emphasised that the figure must be increased.

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