Great Companies- How was the idea of 'Medicento ( Mediclick Healthcare Services Private Limited) born?
Arpan Debasis: It was way back in 2011 while pursuing my engg from Msrit Banaglore I lost my father due to an illness due to lack of medical accessibility and availability for a tier 2 city, Berhampur in Odisha. A solution was much needed to bring about change so no other lives were lost due to the lack of medical facilities and difficulty in procuring medicines and homecare services. While evaluating various healthcare segments, medicine delivery seemed to be the biggest challenge and problem yet to be solved. To streamline the flow of medicines to masses from suppliers, made me start medicento with my long time friend and Now Co-Founder Rahul Vidyarthi.
Great Companies- Your company provides a lot of distributor services and pharmaceutical services, how do you ensure getting efficient and productive results?
Arpan Debasis: When we started medicento the major question asked to our fellow retailers was why do they use Flipkart of Amazon ?? The answer was simple a single platform for product discovery, order processing, service delivery and ensuring payments formed the key to get suppliers and retailers onboard. Instead of dealing with multiple suppliers the retailer use the single platform and get the product on the commitment that it makes to the customer. (Which was our major touch point ) Working around on suppliers inventory by providing a better equation of supply on the basis of demand. This ensures minimum turnaround time and minimizes wastage which in turn creates a better economic value both for suppliers and retailers. And also in house logistics ensures better service and creates a trust among the retailers with point to point to tracking. Added credit was the major tool in b2b payment systems. We devised a new credit facility system to ensure better payments.
Great Companies- You must have faced difficulties when you established this company, what were they and how did you cope up with it?
Arpan Debasis: On-boarding retailers to our online channel wasn’t easy. “We wanted to give an experience like Flipkart and Amazon do to our clients. But they had a traditional mindset and were dependent on the convention of keeping a notebook for stock details. So we asked them to do a trial with us for seven days. They liked our service so much that they started eliminating other distributors. Some distributors even contacted us saying we were destroying their market! Onboarding suppliers as the the initial sale value through our platform was 20,000 per week compared to 1 cr per day by top notch distributors. So as a strategy we started onboarding small time suppliers and passed on better margins to retailers to create a better ground base of retailers. Third was payments, as the market was scarred with non payments from retailers. But we tried to figure out the gap in the market and encouraged retailers to pay on time by ensuring better benefits to them in terms of margins. Fourthly, finding the right techie and a team to build the platform. As the costs soared with professionals so we went on with an intern model by collaborating with colleges. Lastly, we did struggle with funds but a healthy flow of cash from retailers to suppliers helped us in to sustain on an rotational basis.
Great Companies- Medicento uses AI based inventory management system, tell us something about it and its benefits.
Arpan Debasis: We automated the process of collecting data with an app instead of distributors’ salesmen going to pharmacies to collect data from retailers. The retailers just need to upload their inventory; Medicento takes care of the rest. Here we use a pull based mechanism instead of retailer placing orders using a Medicento – Unified medicine Channel traditional notebook it
automatically notifies the suppliers of the stock requirement or positioning which helps them to schedule or plan out in a more efficient manner.The system uses prediction model to notify the stock positioning and forecasts the purchase according to the demand to optimize the inventory.
Great Companies- Any advice you would like to give to aspiring entrepreneurs?
Arpan Debasis: You can start at any point of time with or without any reason but ensure that it touches a million lives. Because in the end, a million dollars never matters but a million lives do. Keep hustling.