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EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW 14 NEWS IN FOCUS Business Manager, Meditec Pharmacy Automation Delivering the most advanced technology to pharmacies on the best commercial terms is the business of Meditec’s business manager, who spoke to Marcela Araneda. Andrew, can you please give our readers a snapshot of your professional career? Out of school, I went to the University of Melbourne. I thoroughly enjoyed the university lifestyle, so kept studying until I’d completed my Master of Commerce by thesis. In leaving university, I managed to string a few good interviews together and got lucky with being able to join one of the world’s leading management consulting firms. The next seven to eight years were unbelievable. While the work and travel demands were relentless, I got to see inside a bundle of the world’s most successful businesses and see their leaders operate up close. It was such a remarkable experience, I took to writing down the key comments from these senior, senior people. I reflect on them from time to time, but two that stand are both from CEOs of Fortune 500 companies. The first is, ‘Find a cottage industry and industrialise it’ and I’ve always thought it does a good job of articulating what Meditec has been trying to enable through our pharmacy automation solutions. The second is, ‘The skill in being successful is doing it to the highest moral, ethical and legal standard’ and does a good job of detailing a core Meditec principle. With a family on the way and in wanting to travel less, my next move was into banking. I had five or six fantastic years being a line manager and learnt much, with a key takeaway being the importance of gaining a structural benefit to help provide customers superior pricing. It was this experience that really helped build the road map for Meditec being able to secure long-term access to price offsets. Meditec was next. We saw the DAA segment as being like a cottage industry, given it had little or no automation, and the timing felt right to do something entrepreneurial and creative. As a result, I traded large-scale banking for small-scale business and we started building. That was probably 10-ish years ago and we’ve grown into the southern hemisphere’s largest supplier of our type, with solutions in every \\\[Australian\\\] state and territory and \\\[New Zealand\\\] district health board (DHB). That said, I think we’re really only at the beginning. With more than 20 years in the industry, Meditec has grown and evolved since its beginnings. Can you give us an update on the many services it provides to pharmacy? Meditec sells, installs and maintains automated packing (DAA), checking (DAA), picking (robot) and storing (cabinet) solutions. As mentioned earlier, we’re the largest supplier of our type in the southern hemisphere with solutions in every state, territory and DHB. Together with a wonderful roster of retail pharmacy customers, we also have a number of state governments as users of our technology. Across all our solutions, the goal of the technology is to deliver benefits that include reducing costs, growing productivity, improving patient safety, optimising pharmacy space and delivering a point of competitive difference. Meditec has enjoyed extraordinary success. What do you see as the three or four key decisions you’ve made that helped drive this success? Interesting question. While lists like this oversimplify an exceptionally complex web of factors, if I needed to identify the most significant decisions, they would be: getting access to the world’s best technology (myjvm.com; omnicell.com); getting a structural price advantage via a price offset contribution; building the market’s most complete service capability; being exceptionally disciplined on costs; and getting multiple state governments to underwrite the business indefinitely via long-term contracts. These five decisions have probably had a disproportionately larger impact on helping our success. The price offset is an example of a contribution we can access that effectively allows people to buy the technology at a discount to where it would otherwise be priced. It makes for remarkable buying. One of your customers recently said that Meditec occupies the very rare competitive space of delivering the most advanced technology on the best commercial terms. How has Meditec achieved this and how has it helped retail pharmacy? Yes, I heard that quote as well. We also heard the CFO of a well-known publisher used Meditec as an example in a recent presentation. He suggested our positioning of selling the best tech at the lowest price made us a rare example of how businesses can deliver optimum value and be the default choice for rational decision-makers. As noted earlier, a big part of what’s enabled this positioning has been our ability to have perpetual access RETAIL PHARMACY • JUL 2020 Andrew Finster