Accurate and fast service for pharmaceutical companies
16.5.2016
Oriola’s Supply Chain Coordinators take care of the daily operations of the pharmaceutical companies. Their work demands accuracy and a customer oriented attitude, explains Customer Service and Supply Chain Manager Elina Veisterä.
Customer Service and Supply Chain Manager Elina Veisterä, what are the Supply Chain Coordinator team’s tasks?
Supply Chain Coordinators take care of customer service for pharmaceutical companies. A Supply Chain Coordinator is a pharmaceutical company’s contact person and helps the customer with questions regarding logistics and value added services. Additionally, some team members are specialized in order handling.
Team tasks vary and include purchasing, invoice handling and the follow up and saving of batch certificates. Supply Chain Coordinators work closely with quality, logistics, sales, finance and reporting.
The pharmaceutical industry and its regulations define parameters for operations, which include many special cases such as quarantine warehousing, narcotics importing and the management of obligatory stock. One of our most important tasks is to support pharmaceutical companies in ensuring patient safety and product availability.
How are tasks organized within the team?
Our Supply Chain Coordination team consists of three separate teams. Two focus on supply chain coordination and one on order handling. Ten people in total work in these teams. Simply put, Supply Chain Coordinators are responsible for customer needs and order handlers support them in operational tasks.
What kind of skills and characteristics are needed from a Supply Chain Coordinator?
A Supply Chain Coordinator must be customer oriented, calm and precise, fast to react and have a good understanding of the product flow from arrivals to picking and deliveries. Also, the ability to handle stress and multilingualism are important as customers are located in different countries and the Supply Chain Coordinator is essentially in the middle of it all holding the strings. Knowledge of the pharmaceutical industry and its regulations is helpful in daily work.
What kind of feedback do Supply Chain Coordinators receive and how do they develop their processes?
Oriola regularly surveys customer satisfaction, but we also receive feedback directly from our customers and partners. Feedback is invaluable in evaluating and developing our operations. We assess our operations from different points of view already in our development projects and we also use Lean tools in developing our processes.
Additionally, we invest in hearing our customers’ voice. As an example, we will be participating in the Voice of Customer training organized in May. I strongly believe in continuous development and in sometimes taking shorter steps and sometimes longer.
Text and image: Myra Magnusson
