pharmaceutical organisation sructure and functions acc.pdf

Pharmaceutical Organization Structure and Functions

Subhash Chand, Girish Gupta and Bhawna Gera

Abstract- Organisational structure is the bureaucratic set-up of an institution by which its staff, facilities and other resources are organised in such a manner as to be most effective in accomplishing the purpose for which the organisation is established. A pharmaceutical company as well as its close relatives, proprietary drugs and toiletries companies are complex organisations. Under its roof a team of scientists, technicians and other specialists come together for representing virtually all the sciences, along with the contribution made by the management executives, lawyers, accountants, engineers, system analysts and may other whose abilities and talents maintains the viability of this unique business enterprise. Current scenario demands for a different organizational structure for a large scale pharmaceutical company and for a small scale pharmaceutical company. Earlier we are having a common structure in which there used to be only one administrator and one or two departmental heads. But now a days when the pharmaceutical companies are becoming gigantic a need for new structure arises. In the new structure a specialist is needed for every individual job because every job today demands for specialisation. The new organisational structure gives us the benefits of specialisation. This structure can be followed by the companies manufacturing wide variety of products as well as the company manufacturing single product but distributing widely. Pharmaceutical marketing departments are concerned with the process by which medicinal products are made available to ultimate consumer from their point of origin. Its manager works with the objective of profit through customer satisfaction.

Keywords- Bureaucracy, Job Profile, Organizational Silos, Portfolio.

I. INTRODUCTION N organizational structure defines how job tasks are formally divided in to groups and coordinated. The

new rules of operating in todays global business environment make structure and design even more critical. There are five key elements a manager needs to address when he designs organizations structure. These are: work specialization, departmentalization, span of control, centralization and decentralization.

Work can be performed more efficiently if employees are allowed to specialize. The essence of work specialization is that, rather than an entire job being done by one individual, it is broken down into a number of parts:

In this work, manager first decides how to divide the overall task into successively smaller jobs. Manager divides the total activities of the task into smaller set of related activities .The effect of this decision is to define job in terms of specialization and responsibility. Although job having many Criterias the most important one is their degree of specialization.

S. Chand is with the Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Kurukshetra University, Kurukshetra (corresponding author to provide phone: 098966534650; e-mail: [email protected]).

G. Gupta is with Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Kurukshetra University, Kurukshetra, (e-mail: [email protected]).

B. Gera is with the University School of Management, Kurukshetra University, Kurukshetra. (e-mail: [email protected]).

After this manager decides the bases by which to group the individual jobs .This decision is much like any other classification decision and it can result in groups containing jobs that are relatively homogeneous (alike). Then manager decides the appropriate size of group to each superior. As we have already noted that this decision involves determining whether spans of control are relatively narrow or wide.

In the last manager distributes authority among the jobs. Authority is the right to make decision without approval by higher manager. All jobs contain some degree of the right to make decisions within prescribe limit.

What is needed is an integrated plan for each key customer in the context of the companys portfolio, rather than the traditional plan for each sales force team. The integrated plan should identify the companys objectives for the customer, their needs, how to address them and who will be responsible for doing so this will lead the company to identify what type of sales people or teams it needs, what skills they should have, what roles they should play, what tools they require, and what system will hold it all together and provide support. Implementing this strategy requires new processes and technologies for information sharing, which in turn requires a change in organizational structure and the breaking down of information silos within the organization.

II. THE PROBLEM Change in the pharmaceutical market requires company

to change their approach and business model. In the part, medical sales forces have mostly called on doctors and other prescribes to sell their product. This approach is focused on transactions and on increasing share of voice. Turnover among sales representatives is often high, making it difficult to build relationship with the customer. Several representatives from the same company might be calling on the same customer to promote different or the same product, presenting further challenges of coordination.

For the purpose of our study we had chosen a sample of 50 pharmaceutical companies from top 500 pharmaceutical companies on convenience basis. In our study, we found that each company is following a different structure (may be functional or divisional) according to size of marketing operations and span of control. As our sampling units were large pharmaceutical companies, we observed a problem that is faced by every HR manager of these companies and that is of employee turnover.

As we went in depth of this problem, we found a reason of this problem. Previously pharmaceutical companies were used to appoint diploma holders, graduates and master degree holders in Pharmaceutical Sciences for the job of Medical Representatives because the job and work demands for specialization. But the employees were paid less as compared to their degree demanded for and as compared to other professionals having the equivalent qualifications but working in other industries (except pharma industry).

A

So a trend came of quitting the job because of work and salary dissatisfaction. As a result, the companies facing this problem started appointing non-professionals (graduates, master degree holders in any stream) for this job and this situation gave birth to the problem of Pharma unemployment on the part of the country. With the passage of time, today a new problem has arisen that the new sales personnel were unable to satisfy the queries of doctors. This results in the avoidance of Medical Representatives by the doctors. This again discards the marketing plans of the pharma companies.

III. THE NEW STRUCTURE Above problem can be solved by adopting the new

structure that leads to more specialization. In fact every structure demands for the specialization. But we are suggesting a bifurcation in the job of Medical Representatives. We suggest dividing it into two parts. We are calling the two new jobs as MRD i.e. Medical Representative for Doctors and MRCW i.e. Medical Representative for Chemists and Wholesalers.

A. Below we are showing a common functional structure of a pharmaceutical company.

B. Following to this, we are showing a common functional-geographical structure of marketing division, which is followed by any big pharmaceutical company

today.

But this structure is giving birth to some problems which we have discussed above. So we are propounding a new structure for the marketing division of a pharmaceutical

company. This new structure will be like this: C. Now in readers mind some questions will arise like: Why two separate divisions for marketing of products

to Doctors and marketing to Retailers/Wholesalers? And if these exist who will be recruited to these two jobs? Whether the persons with same educational background will do both the jobs or the persons with different backgrounds will be needed?

D. The answer to these questions lies in the following text:

As we have discussed earlier there should be two separate divisions because it facilitates the Marketing Function. Different professionals will be needed for these two divisions. Their educational level will be different. For MRDs job the person appointed must possess a degree or higher in pharmaceutical sciences because their job profile demands for pharmaceutical professionals. And they will be paid higher because of their expertise and higher investment on education. For the MRCWs job the persons appointed will be diploma holders in pharmaceutical sciences and they will be paid lesser than the above professionals. After the study we have analysed that the above structure will definitely solve the problem of employee turnover on the part of the pharmaceutical company and pharma educated unemployment on the part of the country.

Marketing Manager

East Zone Sales Manager

West Zone Sales Manager

North Zone Sales Manager

South Zone Sales Manager

Medical Representatives




CEO (Pharmaceutical Finance Manager

Purchasing Manager

Research & Development Manager Production Manager

Marketing Manager

Human Resource Manager

Marketing

East Zone

West Zone

North Zone

South Zone

Medical Representatives for Doctors

Medical Representatives for Chemists & Wholesalers







Make & retain the customer (How to produce better facilities to the customer?)

Connecting organization and the customer (What the customer demandsfor?)

Information demand (Which information is needed?)

Marketing process (How the company will interact to

IV. LAST BUT NOT THE LEAST Changes in business processes and organization are necessary to meet customer needs. When focusing on the customer and the intended interactions with them, many companies will find that their existing processes and internal structures are ill-equipped to put the new strategy into practice. Organizational silos may prevent the transfer of information, create bureaucracy and lead to internal conflicts (over responsibility or authority) that get in the way of engaging with the customer. Internal business processes need to be developed that successfully implement the selected strategy, and an organizational structure needs to be created in which these can be implemented efficiently. Information needs to be gathered in a comprehensive and systematic way, capturing what the company needs to know about its customers and its interactions with them. The organization should be aligned around the customers, with all other functions and processes supporting this structure.

V. CONCLUSION An organizational structure, like any plan, must

reflect its environment. Just as the premises of a plan may be economic, political, social or ethical, so may be those of an organizational structure. It must be designed to work and to help people gain objectives efficiently in a changing future. In this sense, a workable organizational structure can never be static. There is no single organizational structure that works best in all kinds of situations. An effective organizational structure depends upon the situation. The present situation demands for the modification in the old structure that we have discussed.

REFERENCES [1]. B. Gene, T. Manab, Nature of Organizational Structure, in

Management Today Principle and Pracctice, 10th ed., TataMcGraw-Hill, 2007, pp. 160-175.

[2]. M.J. Ivancevich, M.T. Mattesen, Introduction to Organizational Behavior, in Organizational Behavior and Management, 7th ed., TataMcGraw-Hill, 2005, pp. 19-20.

[3]. P.S. Robbins, S. Sangs, Foundation of Organizational Structure, in Organizational Behavior, 12th ed., Prentice Hall of India, 2005, pp. 538-540.

[4]. P.C. Tripathi, P.N. Reddy, Organization, in Principle of Management, 3rd ed., TataMcGraw-Hill, 2007, pp. 109-111.

[5]. H. Weihrich, H. Koonz, Organization Structure: Departmentation, in Mangement-A Global Perspective, 10th ed., McGraw-Hill, 2004, pp. 216-217.

pharmaceutical organisation sructure and functions acc.pdf

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