Four tabs open and still no stock
It is late afternoon and the order has to go in. Three lines on it are showing as unavailable at your main wholesaler. So you open the next portal and search each one. Then the next. One has it at a price well above what you normally pay. Another has it on quota. A specialist supplier might have it tomorrow.
You write the options on a scrap of paper, decide, and place the orders. Tomorrow a different set of lines is short, and you do it again. In a bad month for shortages, this becomes a daily job for someone who should be checking prescriptions.
Why shortages eat so much time
Each wholesaler's portal is built to sell you their own stock. None of them is built to compare. So the comparison happens in someone's head, line by line, across separate logins with separate search boxes and separate ways of showing availability.
The information changes through the day, so a check done in the morning is out of date by the afternoon order. And nothing records what you found, so the same line gets searched again the next day by a different person.
What the manual hunt costs
| Cost | Where you see it |
|---|---|
| Staff time | Portal checks every order cut-off, often by the pharmacist |
| Purchase price | Buying from the first supplier with stock rather than the best option |
| Owings | Patients wait longer because the line was not found in time |
| Repeated work | The same short line searched daily with no record of what was tried |
One shortage list across your suppliers
We build a tool that does the looking so a person only has to decide.
- Your order list, taken from your ordering system or PMR export, with lines your main wholesaler cannot supply picked out.
- Supplier checks. For each wholesaler you hold an account with, we connect through whatever they provide to account holders: an ordering API, an electronic data file, or a report export. Where a supplier offers nothing machine-readable, we say so and leave them as a manual check.
- A single comparison list for each short line: which suppliers show it available, at what price, any quota or restriction, and when the information was fetched.
- A shortage log that remembers what was checked and when, so tomorrow's search starts from what you already know.
- Links to the relevant owings, so the patients waiting on a line are visible alongside the options.
The tool never places orders without a person choosing. It prepares the choice, you make it. We also only use access your accounts are entitled to, following each supplier's terms.
Order cut-off with one list open
At cut-off, the short lines are already checked across the suppliers that allow it. You glance down the list, pick the option that makes sense, and move on. The shortage log builds up a picture of which lines are persistently difficult and which supplier tends to have them, which helps when you set up your ordering for the next month.
The pharmacist gets back the time that used to go on portal searches, and patients waiting on owings are less likely to be forgotten while the hunt goes on.
Is this how your order cut-off looks?
- You log into several wholesaler portals to find one short line
- Shortage checks regularly land on the pharmacist
- Nobody records which suppliers were tried for a line
- You sometimes buy at a high price simply because it was the first one found
- Owings wait because the short line was not found before cut-off