With the development of the digital platform "Mediverse", Arvato offers manufacturers of healthcare products a new opportunity to serve their customers such as pharmacies, hospitals, and wholesalers. The solution is designed to integrate multiple manufacturers while customers only require a single registration on Mediverse. On Mediverse, customers can place orders at the partner manufacturers over a standardized online ordering process and make access various information and self-services. Following intensive testing by pharmacies and manufacturers over the past few months, Mediverse is now live.
When ordering healthcare products such as pharmaceuticals and medical devices directly from manufacturers, customers are often limited to traditional methods of communication: telephone, e-mail and fax. Due to the relatively high fragmentation in the manufacturer segment, manufacturers have avoided investing into their own digital platforms. Certain electronic ordering channels and providers exist in different European markets. However, there is no platform or standard that manufacturers can make use of on an international scale. Nor does Arvato see platforms that provide customers a 360° digital support and self-services around their order process: find and get informed about products such as current information on product availability and prices, ordering, tracking of the order status, access to the entire order history and to all order-related documents such as invoices and delivery notes.
Mediverse will help to close this gap and transfer the order-to-cash interactions between manufacturers and their customers onto a digital platform. "One key argument for our investment into Mediverse has been the high level of automation and the avoidance of unnecessary communication flows. This will support to counter the continuously increasing lack of skilled employees in manufacturer’s customer service teams. This will become a challenge for each company sooner or later. All will require some form of digital response." says Fabian Treese, Vice President Healthcare at Arvato. With a high focus also on the customer experience, he is convinced that human support will remain an essential factor in taking care of end customers: "To retain sufficient capacity and focus for a speedy resolution of complicated and urgent customer cases by highly competent customer service representatives, digital solutions are needed to minimize the workload from order entry and basic simple customer requests."
Due to the market environment Arvato expects the highest benefit in providing a multi-manufacturer platform that allows the simplification and increased transparency of processes for customers. “This starts with the advantage of a unique registration on Mediverse. Based on this, customers will be able to order and interact with several manufacturers in the same way. We expect that customers will make significantly more use of digital services on a multi-manufacturer platform compared to individual solutions. In fact, this is what customers have told us in different markets,” says Oliver Schlink, Mediverse Product Manager at Arvato. Furthermore he explains: “With Mediverse, we offer manufacturers the opportunity to provide their customers with a modern digital service, without having to invest time and resources for IT development and managing the digital service infrastructure and competencies on a permanent basis.“
A team of IT and digital experts as well as healthcare specialists continuously develops Mediverse to integrate additional solutions that make the ordering and service experience even more seamless and wholistic. At the same time, Arvato will not only focus on Germany, but will also make the platform available in other European markets and drive further development in close interaction with its best-practice solutions for distribution. "This allows manufacturers to use Mediverse not only as a standalone service, but also to receive a fully integrated and digitized order-to-cash distribution solution. This differentiates us from all internationally operating healthcare supply chain service providers in Europe," says Fabian Treese.
Mediverse will be presented for the first time at Expopharm as part of the talk "Mediverse - Digitization of Ordering and Service Processes for Pharmacies". The leading European trade fair for the pharmacy market will take place in Düsseldorf from 27th to 30th September 2023.
More information around Mediverse can be found at www.mediverse-online.com
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