IT can help transform Indian pharma industry: new DGCIL chief

Mumbai, Sep 14 (UNI) The Indian pharma industry is poised at an inflection point where it can transform itself from being a largely domestic generics player into an aggressive global participant and information technology (IT) can help it in achieving the goal, said new Drug Controller General of India (DGCIL) Dr M Venkateswarlu.

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

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 optimisation, 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, National Committee on Drugs and Pharmaceuticals chairman Ajay Piramal, who was also chairman of the summit, hoped that the summit would provide a roadmap for the industry to implement technology solutions and to identify issues which could help the sector in competing globally.

CII western region deputy chairman Shrinivas V Dempo, who is also Chairman and Managing Director of V S Dempo and Co Pvt Ltd, 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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