Whenever a disruptive innovation happens, the job to be done remains the same while the state of the art technology solution replaces the old and outdated tools and techniques.
For the case of TMD (thamardaw.com), the job to be done that we are interested in is where the players in Pharmaceutical supply chain, retailers, logistics providers, wholesalers, distributors, and the factories, looking for profitability by changing the way demand or supply information is communicated, improving the inventory planning in warehouses, improving logistics arrangements when moving medicines between the buyers and the sellers, and also changing the financing models. amid the COVID-19 pandemic, orchestration of order-to-cash/procure-to-pay processes on line has been more important than ever in the health market.
Possible collaborations between retailers and/or wholesalers, distributors, factories could be beneficial because sharing of demand and/or supply information, sharing of warehouses and delivery routes in the inventory distribution process, sharing of financial risks, etc could generate savings and/or revenue increase for the players in the market.
TMD is creating a platform to create and facilitate pharmacy e-market, which means, TMD is a market place in a traditional sense. We are now starting with the pharmacy retailer community, we have enough data to prove that our customers (retailers) are willing to pay for centralized services provided by TMD to get latest price info from the wholesalers, distributors, and factories (supply information pooling is done by TMD), purchasing services on behalf of busy retailers (delivery optimization done by TMD), and credit services (TMD bares the credit risks).
The key motivations for TMD to decentralize the above-mentioned services are:
- There is a potential to save the operating costs by TMD as we could outsource the services to retailers with appropriate guidelines (protocols)
- As we are moving away from the need to operating people to carry out the services, using the software to automate the processes (agreements, executions, and payments), we could scale it up with little or no marginal costs.
- If we could create transparent protocols for savings and revenue for our customers, this could not only increase “trust” by the users on our system but also block the competition to some extent.
The key research questions are:
- Are the retailers already looking for ways to reduce overheads and increased sales volumes?
- Are there any issues in forming collaborations?
- Are we able to create and suggests collaboration models with clear incentives for them?