In this guest blog post, Tarun Nohria, Director – EDI Services / Data Exchange at Cencora, shares the key lessons learned about delivering dependable and scalable EDI services through its longstanding partnership with Axway.
At Cencora, 51,000 team members around the world are shaping the future of healthcare. By bringing together manufacturers, providers and patients, our aim is to promote positive healthcare outcomes by ensuring that anyone can get the therapies they need, where and when they need them.
We act as a bridge between manufacturers and healthcare providers, using our expertise in supply chain management, procurement solutions and financial services to provide a high-quality service to stakeholders across the healthcare value chain. Every day, tens of thousands of messages flow across our business, and our electronic data interchange (EDI) capabilities are crucial for making sure those processes run reliably.
From the backoffice to the boardroom
B2B integration is the lifeblood of Cencora and so many other pharmaceutical companies. Despite that, EDI has historically been invisible to many parts of the enterprise. Happily, however, business integration is now moving from the back office to the boardroom.
Increasingly, leaders in our industry are recognizing that the ability to effectively exchange data with partners is tightly linked to performance in many different domains. From security, governance and compliance to operational efficiency, on-time delivery and customer satisfaction, high-quality EDI really can move the needle.
At Cencora, we’ve long seen EDI as a key enabler of our mission. Our integration capabilities —powered by Axway solutions — empower us to meet our service-level objectives, shrink risk, and cultivate trust across our ecosystem of partners.
Meeting demand for always-on services
My team is responsible for EDI and partner integration across Cencora. This crucial function includes a wide range of integration use cases and document types, including business documents such as purchase orders, invoices, and shipment notifications between manufacturers and other healthcare providers.
If pharmaceutical companies get this wrong, there’s a lot at stake. Disruption to EDI services carries the risk of procurement delays and revenue loss. In a worst-case scenario, extended downtime for integration capabilities could even lead to stock-outs that put patient care in jeopardy.
Our B2B integration infrastructure ultimately helps us put therapies into the hands of people who need them, so unplanned downtime is simply not an option. That’s one of the key reasons why we’ve been using Axway B2Bi to support our mission-critical EDI flows for over a decade. Having a standardized and centralized approach to EDI is one of the most powerful tools at our disposal to ensure we can send and receive messages 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Embracing a standardized approach
Over our many years of EDI success with Axway, we’ve learned a great deal about the keys to delivering integration services that perform reliably on a global scale.
One of the most important lessons is to ensure that your data is accurate and consistent. Previously, many of our business units used their own EDI systems and processes, but this significantly increased cost, complexity and risk. As we standardized on B2Bi, we saw those challenges fade into the background.
Interoperability and scalability are also vital ingredients for effective EDI capabilities. With B2Bi, we can bring data from multiple platforms together seamlessly and keep those integrations running smoothly day after day, even as our business volumes grow year after year.
Streamlining critical regulatory processes
In our sector, there are stringent regulatory requirements to meet. One of the most significant is the need to provide U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) certificates when shipping controlled substances — and the cost of compliance failures in this area can be massive.
Here, we’ve found Axway Controlled Substance Ordering System (CSOS) to be an invaluable asset. CSOS allows us to perform real-time tracking and alerting for potential compliance issues. This approach is extremely effective: it helps us reduce the risk of human error, enforce compliance-by-default for controlled substance orders, and track down problems rapidly.
Automating time-consuming manual tasks
Controlled substance orders aren’t the only thing we’ve streamlined through our partnership with Axway. We’re now planning to use B2Bi to automate certificate exchange via the AS2 Certificate Exchange Messaging (CEM) protocol.
This capability is particularly useful for a lean EDI team like ours. We are hoping more and more trading partners will enable CEM so that there is no need to manually track which partners haven’t renewed their certificates and prompt them to complete the task.
CEM can send the new certificate information directly to the partner, where it is updated automatically. In this way, we can avoid time-consuming manual work and, crucially, interruption to EDI services.
See also: Modern EDI partner ecosystem management with AS2 CEM automation
Innovating throughout the value chain
If I were to distil the most important things we’ve learned from our EDI journey so far, it would be that B2B integration is a key enabler of efficiency, compliance, collaboration and innovation throughout the pharmaceutical value chain.
By partnering with Axway, we’re continuously improving the way we deliver those mission-critical integration capabilities to the business, so they can get more routine and life-saving medications to patients around the world.
Are you prepared for where B2B is headed in the next 10 years? Download the white paper to learn more.