Client: Country: Project: Practice:

AstraZeneca Mexico Development of a Microsoft - .NET 2.0 application for capturing sales orders using mobile devices ITS (Integration & Technology Services)

About AstraZeneca
AstraZeneca (www.astrazeneca.com), product of the merger between Swedish company Astra AB and British firm Zeneca Group PLC, is one of the most important pharmaceutical companies in the world, carries out research, development, manufacturing and sales of prescription medications, as well as providing healthcare services.

AstraZeneca is going thorough a high business growth period and needed to improve the positioning of its product line in Mexico City's major drugstores through its distributors. For this reason, AstraZeneca initiated an intense selection process which resulted in the selection of Grupo ASSA to carry out the initiatives that would allow the company to consolidate its growth.

The selection

Grupo ASSA understood AstraZeneca's business needs and requirements and was able to propose a scalable solution that could respond to changing business conditions.

The objetive

The objective established by AstraZeneca for Grupo ASSA was to develop an application allowing sales representatives to register product orders using their Mobile devices (iPAQ handhelds manufactured by HP), and allowing the consolidated sales orders to be sent via FTP to the various distributors. The initiative sought to improve the company's product positioning in drugstores by understanding real-time demand patterns and accelerating the supply process through the distributor network.

CUSTOMER CASE STUDIES

ASTRAZENECA

The service
"We are very pleased with the work carried out by the Grupo ASSA team, we have undoubtedly found a business partner that understands our needs and meets our expectations."

Grupo ASSA implemented a solution based on the development of a WinForm-type application on Microsoft's .NET 2.0 platform, installed on each of the mobile devices used by the company's sales representatives, and a Web application running on a central server. The WinForm application connects to the central Server through Web Services, and allows the sales force to access the following functions: User authentication on the application Confirmed order queries (not yet sent to the distributor) Modification and deletion of confirmed orders Creation, modification and elimination of new orders Order confirmation The Web application has a query screen that permits sales representatives to review orders not yet sent to the distributor over the Internet/intranet. The system returns all pending orders, whereupon each representative can select those to be sent. Once confirmed, the system generates the files and sends them via FTP to the correct distributor. The project was delivered using an Offsite-Offshore model, where part of Grupo ASSA's team worked in Mexico, part in Argentina and part in Uruguay. This allowed for the cost reductions that were part of the objective defined by AstraZeneca.

Luis Ren Angeles

Senior Marketing & Sales Project Leader at AstraZeneca

Technology used

Benefits obtained

Online insight of demand requirements Guaranteed product presence in the various drugstores Updated information for negotiating with distributors Improved production planning An effective and dynamic application that allows scalability in response to changing business conditions

After the successful completion of the order registration project, AstraZeneca has once again entrusted Grupo ASSA to continue developing improvements for the original application and other automatization and integration projects. A mobile application is in development to provide integration with the Medical Visit and Drugstore Visit modules of the current SAP CRM has implemented, as well as an integration between AstraZeneca and its various distributors through MQ Series and Message Broker, with the objective of capturing distributor information, process the data and insert the results into SAP's SD and APO modules.

Next steps

www.grupoassa.com

Order capture application for mobile devices: WinForm application File generation application: Web application File generation process: Service Development platform: Microsoft .NET 2.0, Visual Studio 2005 SP1 Programming language: C + + Database: SQL Server 2000 Operating system: Windows Server 2003 Web server: Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) v6.0