Napp Pharmaceuticals Case Study

Pain Advisory Service Database

Company Profile

Napp Pharmaceutical Group Limited carries out research, development, manufacturing, sales, marketing and distribution of ethical and consumer pharmaceuticals. The company specialises in drug delivery systems and is part of an international group with associates around the world. The Napp Group in Cambridge, UK, comprises Napp Laboratories Limited, Bard Pharmaceuticals Limited and Napp Research Center Limited.

Business Requirements

The Sales and Marketing department of Napp Pharmaceutical Group operate a Morphine Information Service (MIS) for praticising and qualified medical professionals allowing them to order a variety of materials (videos, tapes, brochures, leaflets, datasheets, etc) related to morphine usage. The department receives enquiries by phone or pre-paid cards and orders are entered onto a database. Orders are sent to the warehouse for packaging and dispatch and the stock levels are then updated on the system. However, there were a number of limitations to the system and further development was required. Napp’s minimum requirements for the system included linking multiple orders to one customer and providing a customer history facility, providing mail merge features to generate standardised letters directly for the data entered, reporting on the stock levels and providing ad-hoc reporting.

Our Solution

Based on the previous MIS system, Beacon designed and developed client/server database software for an enhanced system called the Napp Pain Advisory Service (NPAS).

In addition to developing functionality for Napp’s minimum requirements, we implemented many additional features including database printing and exporting, letter production via Microsoft Access, search facilities by various fields, generation of different letters and order information, order processing facilities, letter generation, and multi-level user access. As required by Napp, we implemented a Microsoft Explorer-style user interface with drop-down lists and ensured data integrity, for example by preventing duplicate records and ensuring order records could not be changed once the item had been shipped. Beacon also designed the system to allow stock data to be extracted from Oracle databases which Napp were considering using in the future.

An extension of the project was to develop software to enable the migration of data from the old MIS database to the new NPAS system. The old database had been in use since 1995 and held valuable information about more than 5,500 people who had sought MIS products in the past. Beacon developed software to prepare the data and then migrated the required content to the new system.