The Brazilian Network for Public Production of drugs in the perspective of supply chain management: the role of ICTs

Abstract

The pharmaceutical industry is characterized as an oligopoly with differentiated products in segments of specific therapeutic classes. The global pharmaceutical companies focus their research and marketing efforts on degenerative diseases, as they bring bigger income as result. In Brazil, a distinctive feature is the presence of a set of public laboratories, which comprise the Brazilian Network of Public Production of Medicines (RBPPM), targeting the needs of the Unified Health System (SUS), in great part ignored by the Big Pharmas. The aim of this study is to investigate the use by Brazilian Official Pharmaceutical Laboratories of contributions derived from the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), towards the integration of RBPPM´s supply chain. In its first phase, the field research was carried out through a quantitative approach in all affiliated Alfob official laboratories. This analysis allowed to raise issues that have been deepened by qualitative approach in three laboratories selected from the previous phase. Collected evidences allowed to conclude that the objectives defined by the Health Department at the creation of RBPPM, that could be facilitated by the adoption of the attributes of the SCM network headed, are still incomplete and erratic. The study demonstrated that despite the theoretical and empirical evidences about the capacity of ICT to integrate processes, the Brazilian government labs still make little use of ICT supply chain management (SCM) technologies, and the performance the few tools found proved unsatisfactory and incipient. It is likely that this evidence is a natural consequence of the fact that RBPPM did not use an approach of SCM at the time this research was conducted.