Case Study · Pharmacy Group
The fax is dead. Long live the fax.
How we digitised processes for a pharmacy group and its blister centre.
Around 500 fax documents per day. Approximately 40 users. A business-critical process that had worked for years – and still depended on a significant amount of manual work.
That was the starting point at a pharmacy group serving care facilities and medical institutions and producing patient-specific medication blister packs.
Fax was not a relic of the past. It was part of the operational backbone.
The task was therefore not simply to eliminate fax. It was to digitise the process behind it.
we took on the role of Solution Architect and interim project manager. Together with the business teams, IT and a remote development team, we turned the existing workflow step by step into a robust digital document process.
- Around 500
- documents per day
- Approximately 40
- users
- Around 3.5 FTE
- less manual workload
The challenge: Fax was not the real problem
At first glance, the task looked simple: receive incoming faxes digitally and archive them.
In practice, an entire operational process sat behind that communication channel.
Documents arrived in different contexts. They had to be read, understood, assigned to the correct case, processed and archived in a traceable way. At the same time, the new solution could not sit beside the existing pharmacy IT as another isolated tool. It had to integrate into live operations.
The operating conditions were clear:
- around 500 incoming documents per day
- approximately 40 users in the operational workflow
- high requirements for process reliability and availability
- existing pharmacy systems that had to remain in use
- manual work that created material operational effort
The real architecture question was therefore: How do you digitise a historically grown high-volume process without ignoring the existing system landscape or creating another software island?
From fax to a digital document process
We did not try to automate isolated steps one by one. Instead, we looked at the entire document flow: from intake through text recognition and indexing to assignment and further processing within the existing pharmacy system.
A bespoke document management system based on Laravel was designed and implemented for this purpose.
Google Vision OCR handled automated text recognition. This meant incoming fax documents could be treated not simply as images, but as digitally usable information.
The decisive step was integration with the existing pharmacy IT.
The existing prokas system remained part of operational reality. An interface layer was therefore developed so documents could be assigned digitally and processed further in the established workflow.
The result was not another isolated application, but a digital document process embedded in the existing system landscape.
The architecture came from live operations
The technical solution was not designed in isolation.
We gathered requirements together with pharmacy staff, IT stakeholders and external partners. Existing workflows had to be understood, exceptions considered and technical requirements translated into an architecture that could actually be implemented.
In parallel, Björn managed the remote development team and led the technical delivery throughout the project.
The work therefore combined business analysis, requirements engineering, solution architecture, integration and delivery responsibility.
The result: 500 documents a day, 3.5 FTE less manual work
By the end of the project, fax communication was no longer a separate manual side process. It had become part of a digitised document workflow.
Around 500 documents per day could be processed through one shared digital operating model. Approximately 40 users worked with the new system. Manual workload was reduced by around 3.5 FTE.
At the same time, the architecture created a foundation for further automation and machine-learning use cases.
Results in numbers and structure:
- around 500 documents per day in the digitised workflow
- around 40 users
- around 3.5 FTE less manual workload
- OCR-supported recognition and indexing
- integration into the existing prokas system landscape
- foundation for further automation and machine learning
Written client reference available on request.
What this case means for Solution Architecture today
Many companies face exactly this situation: a business-critical process fundamentally works, but has grown over years. Manual tasks, legacy systems and new requirements become intertwined. Adding another standard tool rarely solves the underlying problem.
This case shows what Solution Architecture means in that context: understand the real business process, translate requirements properly, work with the systems already in place and build a solution that is technically robust and operationally usable.
Facing a similar challenge?
When manual processes, existing systems and new automation requirements come together, the right starting point is not the tool. It is the process, the requirements and the architecture.
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