July 12, 1999

Efficient E-Selloffs

Vendor readies online marketplace

By Gregory Dalton

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oftware vendor Supply Chain Solutions Inc. will launch e-pulse, an online marketplace in the third quarter that will let manufacturers, distributors, and retailers of pharmaceutical and beauty products trade excess and discounted inventory over the Web.

Supply Chain Solutions estimates that companies exchange $6 billion to $10 billion in excess pharmaceutical and beauty merchandise each year. Most deals are handled with faxes, phone calls, U.S. mail, and electronic data interchange, says VP of sales and marketing David Flood. "Our goal is to bring some efficiency to the listing, trading, buying, and selling of excess inventory," he says.

Companies using e-pulse will pay about $1,000 per year to list products, plus a monthly fee of about $20 per user and a small percentage of each transaction. Product information can be viewed with a Web browser and downloaded into standard inventory-management systems.

Pharmaceutical Distributors Inc. of Valencia, Calif., is testing e-pulse with three customers and hopes to begin accepting online orders as soon as Supply Chain Solutions makes that possible. PDI distributes product information in a print catalog or E-mail, and hopes that using e-pulse will reduce the time and errors associated with that process. "Right now, it's basically a manual thing," says Richard Lapinski, VP of marketing. "We see this as streamlining the whole process."

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