- Rapid growth in the FCT and Lagos State
- Opening and approvals in Kenya
- Largest tech-enabled network of community pharmacies in Africa
Shelf Life, the revolutionary pharmaceutical inventory management subscription service, launched and headquartered in Abuja, is today announcing its expansion. It is also announcing that the 100 plus pharmacies in its network are achieving over 96% availability on over 500 life-saving medicines and essential products.
Shelf Life was launched by Field Intelligence in Abuja in July 2017 to sell pharmaceuticals and provide technology-enabled inventory management services to community pharmacies. In Nigeria, there over 100,000 community pharmacies and drug shops, compared to approximately 26,000 public health facilities, making community pharmacy a critical component of accessible healthcare for Nigerians.
The first pharmacy to subscribe to Shelf Life in Lagos was Dom Sema Pharmacy in November 2018. In the last eight months Shelf Life has selectively added 33 additional outlets to its Lagos network. This growth is possible because Shelf Life solves a key and pervasive problem for pharmacies; according to Field’s research, 60% of community pharmacies frequently stock out of essential medicines and 55% are without access to stable supply and finance.
Shelf Life offers an industry-first subscription model and proprietary planning algorithms to forecast and optimize inventory levels for each product a client subscribes to. The improvement in inventory accuracy is helping pharmacies achieve an average 96% availability on hundreds of essential products from over 45 therapeutic areas, including everything from medications for chronic conditions like hypertension and diabetes to antimalarials.
Pharmacies on Shelf Life sell the products Shelf Life plans and delivers on consignment – paying only for what they sell – shielding them from inventory and expiry risk, as well as enabling them to rapidly expand their offerings of medicines and other essential items. Pharmacies on the Shelf Life platform are adding an average of 34 new product subscriptions to their Shelf Life account each month.
By offloading inventory management, logistics, and retail analytics to Shelf Life, they are freeing up an average of US$1,000 in working capital per month. Pharmacists receive monthly business intelligence insights from Shelf Life, which cover inventory performance, pricing, and more. This is helping community pharmacies avoid financial shocks – and making both missed opportunities for pharmaceutical care and costly losses from expiry things of the past.
It is a similar situation in Kenya, where the company is announcing the granting of its licence to distribute from the local regulatory authority, The Pharmacy and Poisons Board. It now has a local team in place and has 37 active retail locations in Nairobi and over 3,768 subscriptions under management.
In Nigeria Shelf Life is licensed and regulated by the Pharmacy Council of Nigeria (PCN) and has secured the National and State-level support of the Association of Community Pharmacists of Nigeria (ACPN).
Mr Timeyin Ogungbe of Elbeth Pharmacy in Lagos says, “I see this as a true partnership. By subscribing to Shelf Life, I can have the right treatments available and I only pay for what I sell and i have an extra 50,000 naira weekly to invest in my business. They do all the deliveries and weekly stock-taking. Plus I get a report telling me about the latest pricing and products I can add to my shelves.”
Suleman Sule, Head Pharmacist, Shelf Life Nigeria, says, “We are bringing discipline, scale and analytics to retail pharmacy management. Through our cutting-edge system and our state-based client service teams we’ve shown that the pharmaceutical supply chain can be transformed by offloading analytics, procurement and logistics to Shelf Life.”
Michael Moreland, CEO and Co-Founder, Field, says, “With over 100 community pharmacies on the Shelf Life platform, we are building the largest technology-enabled pharmacy supply chain network in Africa. We’re only scratching the surface of how technology can transform access to healthcare for many millions of people.”
