Pharmaceutical logistics and application

The pharmaceutical industry can be defined as a complex of process, operations and organizations involved in the discovery, development and manufacture of drugs and medications. In our rapidly changing world today supply chain and logistic management are playing a new role as pharmaceutical and medical device industries seek to get closer to end users and differentiate products with added value. Logistics and supply chain became one of the most important factor in evaluating succes in industry and business sector in which the competitiveness has increased. As competition becomes more global, innovation is moving from a firm to firm level to a supply chain versus supply chain perspective. So pharmaceutical industry players need new supply chain and logistic strategies like outsourching logistic. Third Party Logistic Firms enable pharmaceutical companies to concentrate on improving research and development productivity, synchronizing worldwide product launches and taking advantage of emerging market places. In addition to this safety is the most important issue in pharmaceutical industry. Incidents of counterfeit, tampered, or adulterated product entering the healthcare supply chain is a great concern. With the development of new EPC technology creating the ability to track, trace, and monitor individual product units using RFID, the pharmaceutical distribution industry has the opportunity to transform the evolving pharmaceutical logistics. The next issue is about reverse logistics in pharmacetical industry. It can be considered as a systematic form of product returns and recovery and is defined as the process of managing all of the flow of returned products and information from the point of consumption to the origin. Although many researches have been done about the pharmacetical logistics in wordwide there is only a few research in our country. So this study examines pharmaceutical logistics in theorical frame and logistic activities in manufacturer, distributorrubutor and logistic firms. The research is divided into two chapters. In the first chapter, it mentions pharmaceutical logistics characteristics, conditions, pharmaceutical market and pharmaceutical retail dynamics and second chapter contains some interviews have been done with five different firms in pharmacetical industry. According to research results, in the pharmacetical warehouses ?purchasing? and ?logistic? terms are used as synonyms. In addition to this in pharmacetical industry manufacturers and logistics firms interest logistic evolutions. Key Words: Drug, Pharmaceutic, Pharmaceutical Logistics, 3PL, Reverse Logistics.