Sector(s)
Team Members
Tamro is Finland’s leading pharmaceutical and health product distributor and service provider. Their customer base covers both pharmaceutical and health product companies as well as customers that purchase pharmaceuticals and health products; pharmacies, hospitals, retail sellers and healthcare operators in the private sector.
We began our co-operation with Tamro in the spring of 2019. Tamro has initiated a large scale undertaking to develop and renew their digital services. As a part of this project Tamro wanted to offer their customers a new service channel that provides first rate product information. At the same time there was a need to overhaul their website which provides a multitude of services to their interest groups.
Our Headless Drupal demo was the answer they were looking for, and our co-operation kicked off. We have built two different implementations for the MyTamro service channel using Drupal, and most recently we renewed the Tamro.fi website. We continue to work on the services according to Tamro’s policy of continuous development.
About the project
Tamro aimed to provide a technologically robust set of services that would continue to serve future needs, allow for a better customer experience and lead to growth in their business.
Tamro already had in place a microservice architecture with its own user interface and integration with numerous background systems. We started to build the services on top of this platform.
The priority in the first phase was enriching and managing product information in the MyTamro service channel. Tamro wanted to offer pharmaceutical and health product companies a chance to diversify their product information and support the customers buying those products commercially with product information that may not be available in other databases.
Tamro required a middleware layer for enriching the product information. In addition a headless content management system was needed for MyTamro’s other content pages. The old website was also in need of overhauling in order to fit it seamlessly into the new channel design.
MyTamro service channel
MyTamro is a registration based service channel aimed at Tamro’s customers. The channel works as a B2B webstore for pharmaceutical and health product companies as well as buying customers. The user view is customized based on organization and role. MyTamro is also a central communications channel between Tamro and its customers.
We built two different headless Drupal instances into the technically multifaceted system. They work seamlessly together with interfaces that allow management and editing of information.
One of the instances enables the enriching of product information with, for example, images and video as well as the easy publishing of information. The second instance, on the other hand, manages the other content pages, for example product announcements, current content, service descriptions and the event calendar.
Tamro.fi
We built the new Tamro.fi website to be responsive according to an existing site concept. Unlike with MyTamro, it was sensible to implement the whole Tamro.fi site with Drupal, with the user interface included.
With shared interfaces in place it is possible to bring content smoothly to the Tamro.fi site from MyTamro’s background system. For example, content articles that are to be released both on the website and in MyTamro can be published in one place from where they are directed to all the chosen channels.
Results
The deployment of the MyTamro service channel is well on its way and there are already over 8000 registered users. MyTamro has received praise for its ease of use, comprehensive product information and product images as well as for its visual style.
MyTamro is an attractive service channel for pharmaceutical and health product companies that allows for easy and centralized enrichment of product information. Product information that is both high in quality and kept constantly up to date brings added value to buying customers and their businesses.
In the future, all of Tamro’s customers will meet on the same channel making MyTamro a unique service.
The content management and editing of the Tamro.fi site flows smoothly, and the technical implementation of the site supports the content publishing process. During the first 6 months, the total time spent on the site has increased 6 % compared to the 6 months prior to launch.
Why Drupal was chosen
For the solution Tamro envisioned headless Drupal, which refers to the content management side of Drupal without the user interface. The first thing we did was to implement a proof of concept demo, and the customer was happy with what they saw.
'Headless Drupal would work with Tamro’s microservice architecture both in terms of functionality and cost-effectiveness. It works perfectly as middleware for enriching content, which many larger information systems can’t handle.
