Malaysia’s leading prescription pharmacy group – Alpro Pharmacy has selected Zebra Technologies to digitalise its inventory management system.

Prior to this, the company was manually noting down inventory movements, which was a time-consuming exercise.

After the implementation of a successful proof-of-concept, Alpro Pharmacy is now using Zebra’s TC21 mobile computers and Zebra RFD40 Sleds – an RFID (radio frequency identification) solution, at distribution centres and stores to support an increasing number of physical stores and its e-commerce sales.

Founded in 2002, Alpro provides healthcare and pharmacy services through more than 230 outlets across Malaysia.

Explaining why the company needed a digitalised inventory management system, Alpro Pharmacy’s e-commerce director, Yinchen Lee, told iTnews Asia that over the past few years, the firm saw a surge of more than 400 percent in online orders, while the footfall in physical stores has more than doubled.

This had placed the manual inventory process under “immense pressure”, Lee said.

With Zebra Technologies, the business capacity has increased by an estimated five-fold, and the e-commerce division has achieved an 80 percent increase in operational efficiency for order fulfilment, Lee added.

The average number of daily e-commerce orders has surged from 300 to over a thousand, he said.

Additionally, the use of TC21 mobile computers within the system enabled the company’s outlets to receive notifications of orders and seamlessly facilitate order fulfilment.

“We are able to fulfil customers’ orders within a timeframe of two hours, freeing up time to provide pharmacy consultations rather than dedicating time to the tedious task of product picking and packing”, Lee said.