Enterprise Mobility, Robotic Pharmaceuticals and M2M

I flew home this week from the Midwest, and sat next to a service technician who worked for a manufacturer of robotic pharmaceuticals.  Have you ever heard of such a thing?  Neither had I!  It seems pharmacies install these pharmaceutical vending machines to automate the dispensing of the 200 bestselling pills.  They replace the routine error prone pill counting work in the pharmacy.  Here is where it gets really interesting!

Doctors in their clinics may prescribe medicine for a patient by tapping the screen of their iPad (or any data input device), selecting the appropriate medicine, pharmacy and submitting the order.  The electronic order goes through the practice management software which electronically sends an order to the pharmacy's pharmaceutical robotics vending machine that automatically selects the right medicine, counts the prescribed number of pills, selects the appropriate container, drops the pills into the container, labels the container and spits it out onto the shelf for the customer to pick-up.

The prescribing doctor could be on the other side of the world and is operating a machine that dispenses medicine to you in your local pharmacy.  Wow!  That is a great example of enterprise mobility and M2M (machine to machine) systems working together to deliver an improved and more efficient process.

On another note, I was honored earlier this summer to write the Forward, along with Sanjay Poonen, to SAP Press' new book called Mobilizing Your Enterprise with SAP.  This is now their best selling book!  That of course has nothing to do with me, but it certainly reflects the interest the SAP community has in enterprise mobility.

M2M for ERPs

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Kevin Benedict, Mobile Industry Analyst and Mobile Strategy Consultant

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Full Disclosure: I am a mobility analyst, consultant and blogger. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.