Pharma Veterans

Reviewing the Standard Corporate Hierarchy – Asrar Qureshi’s Blog Post #1036 Dear Colleagues! This is Asrar Qureshi’s Blog Post #1036 for Pharma Veterans. Pharma Veterans Blogs are published by Asrar Qureshi on its dedicated site https://pharmaveterans.com. Please email to aq.pharmaveterans@gmail.com for publishing our contributions here. Credit: Kampus Production Credit: Mikhail Nilov Credit: Yan Krukau Preamble Layer upon layer is the standard team structure that has been around for decades or even centuries. As far as I have been able to understand, the hierarchy was established centuries ago as the communities and tribes formed. Someone was appointed Tribal Chief whose job was to command everyone else. More senior positions like Tribal Elders were created to accommodate more aspiring candidates. Then spiritual leaders and Shamans claimed to be among the seniors and were accepted. The same sense of hierarchy has been prevailing ever since, in every corporate.  Organizations are ...

Career Suggestions for Gen Z – Part 1 – Asrar Qureshi’s Blog Post #744 Dear Colleagues!  This is Asrar Qureshi’s Blog Post #744 for Pharma Veterans. Pharma Veterans welcome sharing of knowledge and wisdom by Veterans for the benefit of Community at large. Pharma Veterans Blog is published by Asrar Qureshi on  WordPress, the top blog site. Please email to asrar@asrarqureshi.com for publishing your contributions here. Photo Credit: Marcus Aurelius Photo Credit: Mikael Blomkvist Photo Credit: Artem Podrez Generation Z are the people who are borne between 1997 and 2012, give or take couple of years. This is the most tech savvy generation because they grew up in the age of technology. They are very familiar and comfortable with gadgets and love to use these. Some of the Gen Z have already come into workforce and others are at stages of education where they need to decide about their career choices.  Lot of research is being done on how and why Gen Z is different from Gen X, Y,...

Poverty of Soft Skills – Asrar Qureshi’s Blog Post #728 Dear Colleagues!  This is Asrar Qureshi’s Blog Post #728 for Pharma Veterans. Pharma Veterans welcome sharing of knowledge and wisdom by Veterans for the benefit of Community at large. Pharma Veterans Blog is published by Asrar Qureshi on  WordPress, the top blog site. Please email to asrar@asrarqureshi.com for publishing your contributions here. Photo Credit: Anna Shvets Photo Credit: Vlada Karpovich This article takes some information from the article by Maria Guadalupe and Bryan Ng. The link appears below. Our CVs, Interview forms, and Appraisal forms always have a space for soft skills. Our inventory of soft skills is usually limited to communication, interpersonal relations, teamwork, and we toss in integrity (which is not a skill)  to make it more worthwhile. We maintain that soft skills are required by the employees to grow in their career. However, we do not link the presence of soft skills to the success of ...

Adjusting Business Model to New Normal I – Blog Post #459 by Asrar Qureshi Dear Colleagues!  This is Pharma Veterans Blog Post #459. Pharma Veterans welcomes sharing of knowledge and wisdom by Veterans for the benefit of Community at large. Pharma Veterans Blog is published by Asrar Qureshi on WordPress, the top blog site. Please email to asrar@asrarqureshi.com for publishing your contributions here. Most of us are coming round to the idea that the past will not return, ever. Whatever we have is what is being termed as ‘New Normal’. If this is so, then we should better get used to it and adjusted to it as soon as possible. In a way it makes sense. We had hope against hope for a year and a half since COVID19 started. We tried lockdown, we tried many other things which came to mind, but nothing has worked as effectively as we wanted it to be. More literature is coming out now which suggests that COVID will stay with us like many other diseases, such a typhoid, malaria, flu and so on....

Perceptions about Pharma Industry III – Blog Post #395 by Asrar Qureshi Dear Colleagues!  This is Pharma Veterans Blog Post #395. Pharma Veterans welcomes sharing of knowledge and wisdom by Veterans for the benefit of Community at large. Pharma Veterans Blog is published by Asrar Qureshi on WordPress, the top blog site. Please email to asrar@asrarqureshi.com for publishing your contributions here. Continued from Previous…… Prices of Medicines are Very High in Pakistan – this is another strong perception, just like the first two we looked at. I can say upfront that the prices of medicines are not very high. Prices of nutraceuticals, supplements etc. which have come into fashion lately, are not regulated at any stage and many of them are being sold at exorbitant prices. Let us examine it further without debating on it. Following factors influence the drug prices in Pakistan. Medicine Prices are fixed by DRAP – All prices, of all types of human medicines are fixed by DRAP. The manufac...

Perceptions about Pharma Industry I – Blog Post #393 by Asrar Qureshi Dear Colleagues!  This is Pharma Veterans Blog Post #393. Pharma Veterans welcomes sharing of knowledge and wisdom by Veterans for the benefit of Community at large. Pharma Veterans Blog is published by Asrar Qureshi on WordPress, the top blog site. Please email to asrar@asrarqureshi.com for publishing your contributions here. Pharma Industry of Pakistan is not among the largest industries of Pakistan, but it a reasonably big sized industry. It is also a popular industry because news, mostly negative, keep appearing about it on various media. I would like to take up some of the commonly held perceptions and examine these to separate myths from facts. Being a Pharma Veteran of 45 years, I do understand the industry mechanics well to comment. Pharma Industry is Highly Profitable – When we talk about profit, there are three stages of profit. There is a gross profit which is calculated by simply subtracting the Cost...

Tender Spots of Pharma Industry VII – Blog Post #392 by Asrar Qureshi Dear Colleagues!  This is Pharma Veterans Blog Post #392. Pharma Veterans welcomes sharing of knowledge and wisdom by Veterans for the benefit of Community at large. Pharma Veterans Blog is published by Asrar Qureshi on WordPress, the top blog site. Please email to asrar@asrarqureshi.com for publishing your contributions here. Sum Up – We come to the concluding part of this topic. In the last six posts, we have seen the Pharma industry situation, progress, and challenges inside and outside. We now sum up the rather long discussion into key take-aways. 1. Regulatory Landscape – has changed drastically during the last decade. There are many more additional parameters, standards, and documents which must be implemented. Compliance was always mandatory but now it is watched more strictly. This is not an initiative from DRAP; these are international requirements and Pakistan cannot isolate itself. Risk-based asse...

Tender Spots of Pharma Industry V – Blog Post #390 by Asrar Qureshi Dear Colleagues!  This is Pharma Veterans Blog Post #390. Pharma Veterans welcomes sharing of knowledge and wisdom by Veterans for the benefit of Community at large . Pharma Veterans Blog  is published by Asrar Qureshi on WordPress , the top blog site. Please email to asrar@asrarqureshi.com for publishing your contributions here .   Disconnect from Reality – Like many other areas, the government administration and departments are disconnected from reality while making policies in the healthcare sector. At times, it appears that this disconnect is deliberate; at other times it is just there. Some examples will illustrate this point. 1.      Pakistan does not have any USFDA approved pharmaceutical plant till now. As far as is known, no company is even going in that direction. USFDA requirements are difficult to meet. Starting from the site to design of ma...

Tender Spots of Pharma Industry IV – Blog Post #389 by Asrar Qureshi Dear Colleagues!  This is Pharma Veterans Blog Post #389. Pharma Veterans welcomes sharing of knowledge and wisdom by Veterans for the benefit of Community at large . Pharma Veterans Blog  is published by Asrar Qureshi on WordPress , the top blog site. Please email to asrar@asrarqureshi.com for publishing your contributions here . International Business – Pakistan has a fairly developed Pharma Industry and our domestic requirement is easily fulfilled by domestic industry. We only need to import those medicines which cannot be manufactured here owing to technology reasons. Similar situation prevails in India and Bangladesh. Many other countries around us are dependent on import of medicines to varying degrees. Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan, Maldives in South Asia, CIS countries from Uzbekistan to Kazakhstan, Philippines, Myanmar, Cambodia, Vietnam among ASEAN countries and almost all coun...

Tender Spots of Pharma Industry III – Blog Post #388 by Asrar Qureshi Dear Colleagues!  This is Pharma Veterans Blog Post #388. Pharma Veterans welcomes sharing of knowledge and wisdom by Veterans for the benefit of Community at large . Pharma Veterans Blog  is published by Asrar Qureshi on WordPress , the top blog site. Please email to asrar@asrarqureshi.com for publishing your contributions here . Reference Countries – DRAP considers reference countries from three angles. One, there is a list of countries from where prices of similar drugs are taken, and a basket price is determined which becomes the basis for price fixation in Pakistan. It was mentioned in the previous blog also. Two, all new applications for registration are checked against availability in the SRA (Stringent Regulatory Authority) countries. These include US, EU, UK, Japan and Australia. If a drug or combination or dosage form is not available in SRA countries, the DRAP rejects...

Tender Spots of Pharma Industry II – Blog Post #387 by Asrar Qureshi Dear Colleagues!  This is Pharma Veterans Blog Post #387. Pharma Veterans welcomes sharing of knowledge and wisdom by Veterans for the benefit of Community at large . Pharma Veterans Blog  is published by Asrar Qureshi on WordPress , the top blog site. Please email to asrar@asrarqureshi.com for publishing your contributions here . Pricing Mechanism – Fixation of drug prices has been a cause of bad blood between the industry and DRAP/Government, besides politicization. Few years ago, many companies went to high court to seek relief. The cases kept on piling and the defendants (DRAP/Govt) kept on delaying proper response. The cases were closed finally after instructions to formulate a new Drug Pricing Policy while taking all stakeholders on board. That took another quite some time and there are still grey areas in interpretation and implementation. Government does not want to leave even a...