Durbin Plc.
Supplier of pharmaceutical products,medical equipment & consumable supplies
Company Overview
With over 40-years’ experience and a highly dedicated team, Durbin Plc is one of the country's leading suppliers of medical products. Starting out as traditional chemists, Durbin's focus shifted gradually towards logistics.Today, the company exports branded and generic pharmaceuticals, medical equipment and consumable supplies to 150 countries around the world. Its many customers include wholesalers, hospitals, chemists, charities and multi-lateral agencies. Durbin is committed to providing a one-stop service and has over 20,000 products.
Durbin's level of service is second to none, following nomination by one of its clients, the company won the Alliots Export Award.This reflects the company's commitment to a comprehensive, one-stop service. It handles every aspect of the export process, including freight and packaging, insurance, storage and customs requirements - and, wherever possible, consolidates requirements into a single shipment.
A Flexible Solution
Durbin chose the Access Supply Chain solution to help them achieve their aim of increasing annual turnover to £20m. The decision was made after an extensive review of the market."We looked at Sage but it just wasn't flexible enough," says Commercial Manager Philip O'Reilly. In particular, the true multi-currency processing offered by Access was excellent, compared with Sage, which needed different customer accounts for each currency.
We chose Access Supply Chain because of the excellent flexibility of the software itself, and the quality of accompanying implementation and support.We received excellent help from our Access Specialist Centre and they even wrote special utilities to help us input data that was held in a multitude of formats,” says Philip.
Strong sales order processing software is essential for Durbin, which advertises that its team of health and logistics personnel can arrange all pharmaceutical requirements with just one phone call, fax or email.
The challenges are immense: in addition to the strict export requirements of the UK, Durbin must also conform to the import requirements of over 150 different countries and comply with Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) and World Health Organisation (WHO) regulations on the storage and delivery of hazardous or fragile medicines.
Meeting the Challenge
Philip is confident in the knowledge that his Access solution meets these challenges. “It allows us to keep an accurate view of our stocks and monitor their expiry dates which are so crucial to our business.” He continues “In addition to detailed stock requirements,Access provides all the functionality needed to plan and control the progress of complex orders, and to handle purchase and sales order processing. It also provides specific modules for resource planning, time recording, job costing and web-based order processing.”
The seamless connection between the specialised distribution (or 'front end') parts of the solution and the core ('back office') financials is particularly important. Any business transaction that impacts on the financials is automatically updated into all the relevant ledgers; conversely, ledger information (such as customer credit status) is instantly available to the system's commercial modules, including the dedicated sales order processing screens.
Entering information just once and allowing it to flow around the business eliminates all the time, effort and errors associated with re-keying.At the same time, by collating financial data from across the company, Durbin also gains maximum benefit from the power, security and reporting capacity of a SQL Server database.
