Pharmaceuticals & Medical Supplies

Lot, expiry and retest on every movement, QC before stock is available, and RSD reporting.

Ask a pharmaceutical company what is in the warehouse and the useful answer is never a number of boxes. It is a lot, with the date it was made, the date it expires, the date it is due for retest, and — in Saudi Arabia — a record of the movement filed with the regulator. A general ERP treats all of that as optional detail bolted onto a quantity. Nama treats the lot as the thing itself: it travels on every receipt, issue and transfer, it decides what may be sold and in what order, it can be stopped in place when something goes wrong, and where the item is under drug tracking, the movement is reported to the SFDA's RSD platform without anyone re-keying it.

The modules this sector leans on

Shared with every other Nama customer — configured for how you work.

Which lot, and when it was made

Nothing sells until quality clears it

Goods from a supplier and goods off the line are both received into an under-inspection warehouse: recorded, costed, and out of reach. A quality control document accepts, rejects, or accepts part and rejects the rest - judged against numeric limits and ranges rather than a yes-or-no tick.

What a pharmaceutical company’s stock actually is

Lot is not an attribute of the quantity in Nama; it is part of what identifies the stock. Every receipt, issue and transfer carries the lot, and the lot carries its production date, its expiry and its retest date, with the system holding a lot to one production date and refusing a line that contradicts it. That is what makes the ordinary warehouse decisions possible: issuing nearest-expiry-first rather than nearest-to-hand, reading expiry and production dates straight off a scanned barcode instead of typing them, and ageing the stock by lot so that what is about to become worthless is visible while it still has value. Inventory is where all of that lives, and it is the same inventory every other Nama customer runs — a distributor and a factory are using one system, not two.

Nothing reaches available stock until it clears

Goods arriving from a supplier and goods coming off the line can both be received into an under-inspection warehouse, where they are recorded and costed but are not available to sell. A quality control document is what moves them: accept, reject, or accept part of the quantity and reject the rest. Checklists take numeric answers and ranges rather than only yes and no, so a result is judged against a limit; the item carries its own re-test period; and quality assurance runs the same way against the operation itself, with an engineer named on it, for the cases where the question is whether the step was performed properly rather than whether the output passed.

Reporting movements to the SFDA’s RSD platform

Where an item is marked as subject to drug tracking, stock issues, receipts and transfers are reported to the Saudi Food and Drug Authority’s RSD platform: dispatch, acceptance, transfer, return, the cancellation of each, by serial number or by lot, and pharmacy sale. The connection is configured rather than hard-wired — credentials per reporting warehouse, a test or production connection, the GTIN taken from the item code, its alternate code or the barcode on the line, and the partner’s GLN read from the customer, supplier or warehouse on the document. Reporting is switched on per document book or term, so it applies to the movements that need it and stays out of the way of the ones that do not. Submissions are queued and sent in the background, and each one keeps the request and the reply in full together with the platform’s per-line codes, so what the regulator accepted is a record you can open rather than a claim.

Making it: potency, batch cost, and the ledger underneath

For the plants among these companies, two things separate a drug factory from a general one. The first is that raw material is issued by active content rather than by weight: production carries a potency on the bill of material line and a maximum potency on the item, divides the required quantity by it, and keeps the before and after quantities on the order so the adjustment stays visible. The second is that cost belongs to the batch. With cost per batch set on the production order term, every lot in the product deliveries is costed on its own rather than averaged into the month, which is what makes one run’s variance answerable. Planning explodes demand through the same bills of material and rounds requirements to whole batches, and everything closes into the same general ledger as the rest of the business — the regulated part of a pharmaceutical company is a layer on the standard system, not a separate one beside it.

Every screen, field and setting is documented in full.

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Good question — already answered

Do you report to the SFDA's RSD platform, and what exactly gets reported?

Yes. Stock issues, receipts and transfers are reported, covering dispatch, acceptance, transfer, return and the cancellation of each, by serial number or by lot, along with pharmacy sale. Which items are in scope is set by a flag on the item; which documents report is set on the document book or term, so reporting is scoped rather than switched on for everything. Reports are queued and submitted in the background rather than during posting, and every submission keeps the request and the platform's reply in full, with the per-line response codes, so a partial rejection names the line that failed instead of failing the whole document.

What happens if we re-post a document that was already reported?

It reconciles rather than duplicates. Lines already accepted are compared against the document as it now stands: a line that has gone is reversed with the matching cancellation, a line that has been added is reported forward, and pending reports for that document are replaced rather than sent twice. There is also a re-commit action on the document status list for anything that needs pushing again.

Our active ingredient rarely assays at label strength. Do we adjust the quantity issued by hand?

No. The bill of material line carries a potency and the item carries a maximum potency, and the production order divides the required quantity by the potency to reach the quantity actually issued — a component assaying at 90 per cent is issued at 1.111 times nominal. The order line keeps the quantity before potency, after potency and after the yield factor separately, so the adjustment can be reviewed rather than taken on trust.

We have run for years without lot numbers and want to start now. Does that mean re-entering our stock?

No. Lot and expiry tracking can be switched on from a chosen date: stock that was already in the warehouse keeps moving without a lot, held in its own balance separate from the tracked stock, while every document after that date must carry one. Creating new untagged stock afterwards is restricted to an administrator, so the untracked balance can only shrink. It is a supported migration path rather than a self-service switch — the fields are treated as privileged.

A lot turns out to be a problem after it has left the warehouse. What can the system actually do?

Two things. A lot still in stock can be blocked from issue for a period, so the hold is enforced by the system rather than remembered by the storeman. And because the lot is recorded on every receipt, production and delivery document, the investigation follows the document chain — where that lot came from and which deliveries carried it — rather than starting from paper.

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