From Physical to Digital
The 24pharma story began in 2003 with a brick-and-mortar pharmacy in Beveren-Waas, Apotheek ‘Blindeman,’ which was joined about a decade later by an online pharmacy operating in Belgium and the Netherlands. The online product range has expanded significantly and includes everything from personal care and beauty products to vitamins and dietary supplements, medical devices, first aid supplies, and more. Today, the online store offers more than 30,000 products and 350 brands.
24pharma is one of the major players in Belgium, but it deliberately charts its own course: “We don’t participate in the ‘race to the bottom’ when it comes to pricing; that’s not a long-term strategy. We prefer to focus on service and fast delivery, and we’re doing very well in those areas,” says Diederik Matthijs.
Since our online store has been integrated with Business Central, we're processing three times as many orders with the same number of people.
Diederik Matthijs, co-owner
Online Store for the Pharmacy
A good ten years ago, the online market for pharmacies was still in its infancy. “I felt that the market was ready for e-commerce ”And so we started shipping products on a small scale from our brick-and-mortar pharmacy."
The company used its pharmacy software for this, since everything was still being shipped from there at the time. “It quickly became clear that the software had nothing to do with e-commerce, so we soon hit a wall. We therefore decided to have a professional online store built.” The company opted for a Magento online store, now also known as Adobe Commerce. This made it easy to add the necessary plugins.
Even after implementing Magento, 24pharma still encountered too many obstacles. “Magento was integrated with that pharmacy software. So while we were able to import orders, that was about it. Inventory, location, stock management—all of that was handled through the pharmacy software, which made the whole process completely inefficient.”
With Business Central, we were able to develop an efficient workflow that helps us work more smoothly.
All orders had to be picked manually. The employees responsible for preparing the orders would print out the online orders on paper and then had to locate all the necessary products. This meant they had to know exactly where everything was stored, which products were in stock and which weren’t, and what needed to be ordered from the wholesaler. “It worked somewhat in the beginning, but we kept growing, and the storage space in the pharmacy quickly became too small. From top to bottom, everything was packed to the brim! It just wasn’t workable anymore,” Diederik says of that period.
The daily number of orders continued to rise, and as the product range expanded, they experienced a significant loss of efficiency. “We were stuck with our current software. We needed something better! We decided to explore the market and look for a well-functioning, automated warehouse management system, or WMS. Our starting point was that anyone should be able to quickly pick and process orders. We wanted an intelligent system that was scalable and, ideally, an international ERP package that is continuously improved.”
In addition, seamless integration with the online store and a connection to the shipping software were also necessary. “As soon as an order is picked, the shipping label must be printed automatically.”
Dynamics 365 Business Central and Magento: From Manual to Automated
In the end, it was the Business Central ERP and WMS system that best met all the established criteria. “With Business Central’s ERP software, we were able to develop an efficient workflow that helps us work faster and more smoothly,” Diederik agrees.
When an order is received from Magento, a sales order is automatically created in Business Central. The system then checks whether all the products in that order are in stock. If so, the order is automatically released and can be picked.
Orders in which not all products are in stock must be placed. “This is also done in Business Central by submitting a purchase request to the wholesaler. We do this intentionally so that we have a clear overview of what still needs to come in. We then receive an immediate response from the wholesaler about which products will be included in the next delivery. Some products aren’t in stock locally there either, but have to come from another location. We find that out right away, too.”
All complete orders are therefore processed almost immediately. Scanners equipped with Tasklet Factory’s Mobile WMS receive all information from Business Central and help employees pick orders digitally. They do this by following a ‘smart’ route, so they don’t have to walk any unnecessary kilometers. Each product that is picked is placed in a bin, and once the pick list is complete, all bins are transported to the packing area.
The packers then scan the full ‘pick bin,’ which opens a pop-up in Business Central that says: “This bin should contain five items. Scan all of these items.” This is a verification step that ensures virtually no errors are made. According to Diederik, this used to happen more often: “Back then, you’d just glance at the product from a distance, but you couldn’t always tell the difference between a 60-ml bottle and a 90-ml one. And that’s when mistakes happened. Now that risk is minimized, since all products in an order must be scanned using the barcode.”
Invoices are generated overnight in a single batch. That process is therefore also fully automated.
After the packer has correctly scanned all the products from a picking bin, Business Central indicates that the order is complete, and the shipping label is printed. All products are then placed in a box, and the packer affixes the shipping label to it. The finished package can then be set aside for pickup by the carrier.
Smooth ERP implementation and integration with the online store
“I knew that Alistar had a lot of expertise in Business Central and e-commerce integrations. We looked at other software packages as well, but Business Central was already cloud-based at the time, and I saw that as a major advantage. So we quickly chose Alistar as our implementation partner.”
“Veronique, the other owner, and I were particularly involved in the implementation process, along with the Alistar consultants and the Magento team. We felt it was important to bring the experts from Alistar and Magento together so that any integration issues could be resolved proactively. That turned out to be very efficient!”
“Working with Alistar went smoothly, and we were able to get started with the new system right away. Of course, a few issues cropped up at first, but because Alistar consultants were always on-site during the first month, everything could be adjusted and improved immediately. They adapted very quickly to implement the right solution.”
“Since implementing Business Central, we’ve mainly gained capacity through the automation of order processing. And we even have some leeway to handle more, so we’re definitely set for the future.”
The wealth of data the system contains is one of the reasons we chose Business Central.
Power BI for Business Intelligence on top of Dynamics 365
“We aren’t using Power BI for forecasting yet, but we do plan to start doing so in the near future. We need to make better and more extensive use of the data from Business Central—after all, there’s still so much we can learn from it. That treasure trove of data housed within the system is also one of the reasons we chose Business Central. What is the average lead time for products? Which products have margins that are too low? Who can pick the most orders in a day? Who can pack the most in a day? These are all interesting insights we need to start working with in the future,” concludes Diederik.
Despite this increase in productivity and efficiency thanks to their ERP system, 24pharma wants to do even more with Business Central in the long term. For now, they are only using the standard reports in Power BI—for example, to view sales history from the past few months compared to last year.
