Pharmaceutical/Medical Device Industry WMS Solutions
- TENON’s commitment
- The issues customers face
- Key points in solving issues
- Overview of our service
- Uniqueness and advantages
TENON’s commitment
Tenon provides warehouse management system (WMS) solutions for pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturers.
The warehouse and logistics operations of pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturers in Japan are typically conducted at a small number of logistics sites covering wide areas such as eastern Japan, western Japan, Hokkaido, and Kyushu. WMS solutions for the pharmaceutical and medical equipment industries contribute to the improvement of efficiency and reliability of major warehousing operations including shipping, receiving, inventory movements, and stocktaking at medium- to large-scale warehouses, premised on linkage with ERP systems.
The issues customers face
Sales of pharmaceuticals and medical devices in Japan generally involve transactions with pharmaceutical wholesalers and dealers, and require handling of order receipt via systems such as JD-NET and @MD-Net with linking of shipping information to a WMS.
As product lot management is indispensable to achieving traceability in product shipping and receiving, linkage of lot allocation and shipping instruction information between enterprise business systems and WMS is vital.
To ensure that shipping work is not stopped by outages in the close linkages that exist with enterprise business systems, there is a need for the ability to perform shipping and receiving operations, output of related slips, linkage with automated warehouses, and other tasks through the WMS on its own.
Key points in solving issues
Key points in constructing a WMS solution for the pharmaceutical and medical device industries are as follows.
- Achievement of lot allocation and prevention of lot reversal during order receipt, along with picking interlocking for specified lots, through functional linkage between enterprise business systems and WMS in order to ensure the traceability that is crucial in pharmaceutical product logistics
- Output of delivery slip guidance and other slips tailored to industry standard unified transaction slip formats
- Download file output tailored to forwarders’ specific invoice formats or delivery companies’ slip issuance systems
- Data linkage with automated warehouses capable of low-mix, high-volume shipping
- Compliance with GDP, GMP, and other guidelines in warehouse management work and implementation of CSV that covers implementation, operation, and maintenance of WMS
Overview of our service
Our WMS solution for the pharmaceutical and medical device industries provides main warehousing functions (shipping, receiving, inventory movements, stocktaking) and functions for information linkage with enterprise business systems, specialized for pharmaceutical manufacturers or medical device manufacturers.
- JDLinkage of shipping lot instructions and receipt of shipping instructions from ERP, matched to the JD-NET/@MD-Net order receipt capture cycle
- Linkage with ERP timed to receiving schedule, shipping instructions, etc.
- Statement of delivery note output in shared formats matched to shikiri, and file download functions matched to forwarders’ specific invoice formats or delivery companies’ slip issuance systems
- Linkage with picking/shipping inspection/packing tasks based on shipping instruction data, and receiving/shelving inspection based on receiving schedule data
- Support for picking methods such as total shipping and order-specific shipping, and shipping package formats such as case and bulk packaging
- Support for case, assortment, and packing methods matched to the characteristics of large-quantity, low-mix shipping
Uniqueness and advantages
Our WMS solution for the pharmaceutical and medical device industries contributes to efficiency, quality improvement, and cost reduction in customers’ warehousing work through the following unique points and advantages.
Improvement of efficiency of warehousing work
- Enables inspection of main warehousing work including shipping, receiving, inventory movements, and stocktaking using wireless handy terminals, contributing to improvement of task quality and capacity
- Supports varied methods of picking work including order/total, contributing to work efficiency
- Adaptable to not only flat warehouses but also varied warehouse layouts through data linkage with WCSs (warehouse control systems)
- Achieves real-time system linkage and integration with SAP ERP and other higher-level system business processes
Improvement of warehouse management system RAS (reliability, availability, serviceability)
- Enables continuation of business through list picking in the event of failure occurring in areas outside of wireless range where handy terminals cannot be used, or in higher-level systems such as SAP ERP
- Supports audit trails at the level required for SAP ERP and other enterprise business systems, and is able to manage change history for users, items, modification dates, etc. in addition to system logs
