Pharmaceutical distributor streamlines operations with new CRM system

A pharmaceutical wholesaler operating within a tightly regulated supply chain has streamlined its operations through a new CRM system designed by UP-STRIDE.

Their existing systems could not adequately track the relationship between a single customer order, multiple outbound partial shipments, supplier purchase orders, and the invoicing that needed to follow each delivery.

Orders were being managed through a combination of spreadsheets and manual processes, creating compliance risk, invoicing errors, and poor visibility for both the operations team and their customers.

The new system was built within Salesforce, creating a clear parent-child relationship between sales orders, individual shipments, and corresponding purchase orders.

Automated invoice generation was configured to trigger for each partial shipment, ensuring customers were billed correctly and promptly for every delivery made - not just the completed order.

A real-time order status dashboard gave operations staff and management instant visibility of what had been shipped, what was outstanding, and what was awaiting supplier confirmation.

The system was designed to handle both inbound flows (partial deliveries from suppliers) and outbound flows (partial shipments to customers), covering the full order lifecycle.

GDP compliance requirements were incorporated into the workflow design, with mandatory data capture fields and audit trail functionality built into every transaction record.

Successful implementations eliminated manual tracking spreadsheets and the associated error risk across the operations team.

Invoice accuracy improved to near 100 per cent, reducing disputed invoices and debtor days.

Customer query resolution time has also dropped from hours to seconds and the new audit trail capability provides a complete, timestamped record of every shipment and transaction for GDP compliance purposes.

Gabriel Imevbore (pictured), partner at UP-STRIDE Limited, said: "This was a great example of a business where the complexity of the operation had genuinely outgrown the tools they were using.

“They needed a system that reflected how their business actually worked — not a standard off-the-shelf CRM configured for a simple sales process.

The Salesforce implementation we built gave them control, compliance, and confidence in their data for the first time."