Day 6 - Sales Dept. and NPCB

Coming back from the weekend and today is Monday! This morning, we met Steven Leong who is one of the Sales Managers (SM) in MSD. There are few franchises (or category) in the sales department. Each franchises directed by a SM and Steven is one of the SM. Sales department also works closely with the marketing department which helps in planning consumer corporate event. This is to let the consumers be more aware of the existence of the products.

MSD has its own very systematic structure of organization. There are different posts such as Area Manager (AM), Senior Product Specialist (SPM) and Product Specialist (PS) work under a Sales Manager (SM). AM will probably be the one taking over SM’s position when SM is not available. Do not think that sales department is not related to us pharmacy students. In fact, this department also provides great opportunity for the pharmacists!
Team communication is very important within the department, it can be through phone calls, email or team meeting in the office discussing the team direction, reflection and addressing issues, sales target roll out in the year etc. 

Since MSD is a research company, most of the medicine selling is original/innovator products (not generic), thus their main target consumer would be the general practitioners (GP) who prefer to use originals. The sales data/ record are consistently updated by the team via a network which can be accessed to with wireless 3G. Yeap, they all have IPads to carry around. They even use the Ipads to show certain product videos to customers!

For those who are interested in sales career, as you know, with many sales jobs being commission/inceptive-based, it can offer the right person significant professional and financial rewards, which is really challenging and attractive. So what is the difference between incentive and commission? Commission is a percentage of what the company makes that is your pay and incentive is usually paid when you achieve certain target levels of policies sold for the month/year.No matter what amount you sell you’ll still get commission from a single item you sell. 


From Steven, he personally recognizes that some of the most successful salespeople share a few personality traits like ambitious, confident, outgoing, adaptable etc. As an SM, Steven needs to coach the PS and also keeps on track of their performance.
After lunch, we accompanied Sheen Wei to the NPCB which is 5 mins away from our office. It was a lot of walking! This is because visitors are only allowed to park at the outer designated spots and then you have to use your "number 11 car" pair of legs to walk around the large area of the compound! If you're working as the regulatory pharmacist, this is where you will frequent to on and off, and will also bump into other phama company pharmacists as well! 

The facade of NPCB

Yeap, still have to register for visitor pass, even though they see you almost everyday...XD

Er....I think it's the place where you pay all the relevant fees

Wait, what fees, you may ask? Take a look at the brochure below

Entiti Kimia Baru (NCE) memerlukan RM4000 setiap produk, manakala Entiti Kimia Baru dengan dua atau lebih bahan aktif, RM5000 perlu dibayarkan pula! Betapa mahalnya pendaftaran produk ubat-ubatan....

As you can see, we went to the administration centre, where all the administrative work is done...

The meeting room for the product post-registration centre. The product post-registration centre is where all the applications of changes to the LPC, CMC, excipients...basically any changes to the product, is made.

This is the Pusat Pendaftaran Produk. It's where we got the brochure from. You can see many thick files containing Dossier documents. Whenever a regulatory pharmacist submits a file, he/she has to sit with the government authorities to discuss through and clarify any doubts, in hope to prevent delays on the application.

This is the cosmetic units. NPCB also deals alot with registration and regulatioon of cosmetics, from facial wash to SK-II, down to even toothpaste! But companies like MSD don't deal with cosmetics product. so we didn't go in.

The New Product Analysis Centre. This is where the clinical data of the NCEs are evaluated, and also where the samples are tested to see whether it aligns with the approved concentrations, compositions etc.

This is the Pharmaceutical Services Division. It deals with the setting of codes and regulations governing the practice of retail pharmacists, hospital pharmacists, pharmaceutical companies etc. It's also in charged of setting the policies on pre-reg training and government compulsory services. It's also where you need to go to renew import license, poisons license etc.

This is also why many pharma companies are also relocating to petaling jaya area as it is near the bureau and is more convenient for regulatory pharmacists to travel to the NPCB.