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When one opens the packaging of a pharma product, out comes a tiny piece of paper. However, not many people take notice of this little piece of paper wedged on the prescription medicine bottles. Medical practitioners, however, routinely do. They meticulously look into the drug labels for more information before prescribing them to their patients. The labels on the bottle and on the packaging box contain copious amounts of data which is crucial throughout the product lifecycle: from production to prescription and disposal. Any change in schedule should be captured in the labels and corrective actions must follow to ascertain the propriety. Evidently, evaluation of drug labels is a critical pass criterion in the pharma products before they hit the markets. Given the sheer complexity involved in the drug delivery process, drug labels play a major role, and information technology is used at every stage to guarantee an efficient workflow. Visualizing the necessity as well as an opportunity, Stephen Kauffman, an industry veteran incepted BlueSoftware with an objective to revolutionize the packaging and labelling processes involved in the Pharma industry. The company’s flagship platform, Blue which is a SaaS solution for graphics workflow management and optimization has enabled the company to carve a strong niche for itself in the market. The platform helps clients in marketing process management, packaging design process, online review management, digital asset management and product performance. Stephen Kaufman, Chief Product Officer of BlueSoftware, adds, “in addition to our flagship product, it is the speed and quality of our services which have been the top driving forces for our company’s success.”
Commencing with a sole pharmaceutical client, BlueSoftware over its 12 year long presence in the industry has had an enthralling journey serving nearly 100000 users, across 12000 brands and 5000 companies, spread across more than 150 countries with its single integrated delivery platform. In this process, the company has received countless testimonies from several clients including Merck pharmaceutical, Global Pharmaceutical Manufacturer, United States Gypsum, Shrine Blind, Elanco blind and many more. Head of Artwork & Technical Operations at Global Pharmaceutical Manufacturer, showers praises saying, “Keeping our Packaging BOM data up-to-date was critical to our business and we have been able to demonstrate the business value of using BLUE Connect to transfer data between BLUE and SAP.” Yet another testimony comes from Chris Miller, Business Systems Analyst, Shire, “After completing our BLUE integration with SAP, both the Artwork and Planning groups have much greater visibility into the product artwork lifecycle. Everyone at BLUE, particularly the Customization and Project Management teams, stepped up to ensure the project went live on time.” Such testimonies from some of the pharma industry bigwigs reflect the value proposition BLUE brings to the table and its commitment to its client success.
The Blue and BlueSoftware Flow
Since the late 1990s, several multinational companies forayed into the pharmaceutical and consumer products industry. Soon, they began facing challenges pertaining to managing their digital assets stored in the form of graphic art works. At that time, though computer hard drives and Compact Discs were able to store digital artworks, there was no way to correlate, search, or filter them. There were no means to distribute the information securely across the globe. This led, BlueSoftware to venture out out as a digital assets management company. It organization’s priority was to move digital artworks from specialized software suites to easily view able web browsers. Stephen recalls, “At that point we had two distinct offerings: An easily brows able digital assets library which could be accessed using a web browser, and a workflow solution, which could move graphics or information through organization’s internal processes and into-and-out of their supply chain.” It helped ad-agencies, and design and pre-media firms in their printing process, and consequently, helped BLUE become the most preferred means for the pharmaceutical companies to communicate internally and with their suppliers in a structured workflow.
During its initial years, BlueSoftware delivered only on-premise software, however, in early 2000’s, the software deployment dynamics took a sharp turn and non-pharma clients started demanding that their software be hosted on the cloud and scale depending on the business needs. By 2010 pharmaceutical companies took notice of the growth in the cloud based deployments and began to accept the idea that cloud deployments can be as safe and secure as their on-premise hosted applications. It was at that infliction point that BlueSoftware observed rapid movement of pharmaceutical clients into its SaaS hosted software, and today almost all its clients are on SaaS platform, leaving a handful few who are still on-premise and are in the transition.
Intelligent algorithms drive BLUE’s workflows automatically. For instance, SAP system initiates new processes without any manual intervention from marketing or execution teams. Similarly, an integrated ERP system from SAP and Oracle continuously monitors client’s financial and manufacturing perspective and generates real-time reports. “Beginning in 2010, self-initiated workflows in BLUE has been a major step in our evolution, and now more than half of our pharma clients initiate their BLUE processes from their ERP,” Stephen elucidates.
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“BlueSoftware’s process starts right from the time the labelling content is originally developed by the pharmaceutical company till it gets printed on the labels and distributed in the market”
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