How Keka is injecting new efficiencies in pharmaceutical companies with its automated HR functions
With 65 branches in seven cities, Oliva Skin and Hair Clinic was struggling with tracking and recording working hours of its consultants across outlets when the company noticed that a traditional enterprise resource planning (ERP) system wouldn't cut it. Without a biometric identification feature, the company had to manually collect biometric data of the consultants and then compile it, which often led to loss of employee data.
It wasn't until the Oliva team leveraged Keka's human resource management system that it observed how automation could help it boost productivity. Within months of implementing Keka's HR payroll software, Oliva clocked a 45 percent surge in productivity and started storing its employees' data on a centralised online platform.
Moreover, Oliva's location heads didn't need to visit clinics anymore to check on consultants. The software also sent separate reports on verticals like attendance, payroll and shifts for each of the outlets, thereby providing the HR department an analytical view of the performance in each area.
"Within months of implementing Keka, we attained a remarkable increase in transparency and punctuality. It reduced our mundane tasks, and our consultants were really happy with the mobile app," says Gopala Krishna Mantha, Senior Manager, Oliva Skin and Hair Clinic.
Embracing digitalisation to explore new opportunities
The Indian pharmaceutical industry is one of the biggest manufacturers of generic medicines and caters to around 20 percent of the global supply in terms of volume, according to Invest India. Plus, it supplies over 62 percent of the global demand for vaccines. The statistics indicate the massive impact the industry drives in the global healthcare ecosystem and how it can help pharmaceutical companies explore global markets.
Despite the opportunities available to them, many pharmaceutical companies often struggle to maneuver their way through challenges like technological advancements, rising competitions, patents, lack of scientific productivity and stable pricing.
While some of these hurdles do get noticed, others like inaccurate attendance tracking, impenetrable shift rosters and lack of transparency across organisations usually don't get noticed until they've already done the damage. These noticed and unnoticed challenges together can impede the growth of pharmaceutical companies by impacting productivity, organisational growth and employee dissatisfaction, among others.
Keka aims to counter these problems by helping companies adopt digital solutions and making their digital transformation experience a seamless one. As is the case with industries like healthcare, agriculture and finance, the pharmaceutical sector can also tap into new avenues of growth by embracing digitalisation. By increasing their dependence on cloud platforms, analytics, artificial intelligence and machine learning, these companies can look forward to boosting their productivity, staying agile, better data security, saving time and optimising costs.
What sets Keka apart is its customised solutions for different kinds of companies, be it those hiring white collar professionals or blue collar professionals. For instance, Keka enables pharmaceutical companies to track their medical representatives and assign them specific areas via its geo-tagging feature, so that the areas covered by them do not overlap. The approach can help companies avoid delays and streamline their efforts and the workforce in a more efficient manner.
Infusing productivity in HR processes
Its solutions sport a multilingual user interface to enable all employees to access the platform and the intuitive features make it easy to navigate through the platform. Tasks like downloading pay slips, tracking attendance, shift allotment, leave encashment and raising a helpdesk ticket, among others can be easily automated.
Meanwhile, the management of these companies can get direct access to employees' data, irrespective of their location, generate reports about various divisions and get analytic-based insights with just a click. These automated HR functions can usher in more visibility and transparency while taking lesser time and minimal efforts.
Take the example of Hyderabad-based Metrochem API which was able to simplify its compliance management needs by leveraging Keka's automated solutions. The company manufactures active pharmaceutical ingredients, pellets and intermediates in multi-therapeutic segments.
With over 2,500 employees on its roll, the company was finding it difficult to continue with its practice of manually maintaining records in paper and the existing employee management method which was impacting its productivity. It was at the suggestion of its Vice President-HR Rajesh K that Metrochem API switched to Keka for its HR processes.
Within a few months of implementing digital solutions, the company was able to switch to online records, where employees' data was handled centrally for all its plants, thereby doing away with the need for site visits.
The HR departments no longer had to spend their time on overtime calculations as extended hours were tracked automatically. Lastly, the switch to automated HR functions helped the company increase its employee productivity by 26 percent.
“One of the best employee- friendly, people processing software in the market. It has always found ways to impress us with its features and support. Compliance management in pharma is very complex, but Keka made it easy, like never before. Implementing Keka was indeed the best decision we took,” says Rajesh K, Vice President-HR, Metrochem API.
The pharmaceutical industry is expected to hit a valuation of over $65 billion by 2024 and of around $120 billion by 2030. The sector is rife with opportunities that one cas explore with automation and emerging technologies like AI/ML and the data-driven insights. With years of experience of helping pharmaceutical companies reimagine their HR processes, Keka can help enterprises uncover new possibilities and scale ahead.