Pharmac Oy is a modern pharmaceutical company offering consumers, pharmacies, and healthcare organizations smooth, safe, and cost-effective medication dosing services. Pharmac utilizes Europe’s most advanced production facilities for machine-assisted medication dosing.
“Several people benefit from our medication dosing service. Society saves on medication costs, the amount of waste and discarded medication decreases, and caregivers can redirect their time to more important tasks. We continuously improve our operations and production methods, with a strong focus on quality, ecological, social, and economic sustainability. Customer-centricity and agility in product development are key drivers for us,” explains Pharmac’s CTO Jani Leppänen.
As existing solutions did not meet Pharmac’s needs, the company embarked on developing its own ERP solution specifically for medication dosing. The underlying goal was to build a solution that they could offer to other industry players as well.
Creating a World-Class Product with Agile Methods and Quality Assurance
“At Pharmac we had a consensus that agile development would be the best and most efficient way for our product development process. We wanted to improve our teams’ expertise and capabilities in agile, and therefore we reached out to Taskmill, who is known as an industry expert.” recalls the CTO of Pharmac Jani Leppänen.
The collaboration with Taskmill began in the spring of 2022 with an agile training series aimed at ensuring the teams could develop new products efficiently and with high quality. The secrets of agile, scrum, and lean were unveiled, and the teams eagerly applied these learnings to their daily development work. In addition to the training, Taskmill’s organizational coach Raija Harle also provided coaching to the teams on practical challenges in their day-to-day work.
Pharmac also needed to strengthen its capabilities in testing and test automation. Taskmill brought in its partner, Testimate, which specializes in testing and quality assurance consulting.
“We’ve been collaborating seamlessly with Taskmill for several years, serving our customers with our complementary areas of expertise,”
says Janne Pietikäinen, Business Development Manager at Testimate.
From Workshop to Product
Pharmac offers their customers an exclusive service for ordering medicine, information retrieval, and training through their extranet. Pharmac decided to modernize the extranet and integrate it with their new ERP system. They turned to Taskmill for help, and we kicked off the collaboration by delivering a series of facilitated workshops. The first workshop clarified the product vision and the portal’s purpose, followed by another where service features were refined and team responsibilities clarified. Teams learned to document features using the epic-feature-story hierarchy. One of the workshops concentrated on documenting ideas. The goal was to ensure the whole team contributed to shaping the product by writing features and providing developers with enough insight into the customer’s needs.
Reducing Manual Work Through Test Automation
Next, Pharmac wanted leverage test automation for basic functions and common use cases to reduce the manual workload. Testimate experts launched a proof of concept for test automation, to pilot the benefits for product development and share knowledge among Pharmac’s staff. The proof of concept exceeded expectations, and the success of this phase led to further collaboration in 2023, strengthening testing practices even more.
From Self-management to Community-led Management
The partnership between Taskmill, Testimate, and Pharmac has yielded impressive results: the new ERP runs smoothly, the extranet supports multiple stakeholders, and both development and testing processes have reached new heights.
“All three companies share common values and principles, and hence the collaboration has been flexible, effective, and enjoyable. Our teams combine both Pharmac’s employees and consultants. The atmosphere is relaxed, the drive to get things done is strong, and everyone is working towards the same goal.” praise Raija Harle and Janne Pietikäinen.
“Our services bring together patients, their families, pharmacies, doctors, and healthcare professionals – safely. Our company culture is all about collaborating with various partners – everything is possible when there’s a shared goal,” says Jani Leppänen with a smile.
This spring, Taskmill’s expert will continue supporting Pharmac in community-led management, while Testimate’s experts will fine-tune the test automation to perfection. Pharmac continues its journey, making everyday life smoother for thousands of people by ensuring medication safety with their services.