Abstract
Pharmaceutical industry caters to the health care needs through manufacturing drugs that cure diseases. With retailers being one of the customers in this industry, it is imperative for any pharmaceutical companyto address the issues concerning their preferences for these drugs to remain competitive in business. This prompts us to investigate the factors that influence their decisions in selecting the pharmaceutical products. This paper aims to identify those factors and rank them through application of analytical hierarchy process (AHP) with the support of the Expert Choice Software version 11.0. In this regard, six factors are identified, namely, quality of products, availability of products, variety of products, delivery deadline, flexibility in quantity, and competitive price that affect the purchasing decision of the retailers. The result indicates that among the chosen six factors, quality of products is ranked first followed by variety of products, availability of products, flexibility in quantity, competitive price, and delivery deadline. Inconsistency level as generated by the synthesis of AHP is found to be 9% that falls below the threshold value of 10%, signifying to the acceptability of the result. The implications of the findings on the part of the pharmaceutical companies and suggestions for future research are also put forward.
Highlights
Sickness is a common phenomenon in the world and the entire human race of Almighty faces this experience
The weights or the rankings of the six factors are generated by Expert Choice software
The reason for choosing this factor by the retail pharmacy is customer satisfaction; besides, it affects corporate performance since customers will buy a product from companies they will be satisfied with, i.e. such products that will meet their expectations
Summary
Sickness is a common phenomenon in the world and the entire human race of Almighty faces this experience. Drugs prescribed by doctors generally prevent people from having expensive treatment such as undergoing a complex surgery (Zhang & Soumerai, 2007). For this reason, pharmaceutical industry has concentrated on fulfilling the world’s medical needs. Pharmaceutical industry has concentrated on fulfilling the world’s medical needs These organizations are committed to discovering, developing, manufacturing and marketing innovative medicines that treat diseases and improve health care (Gennaro, 1990). Pharmaceutical industry is very unique as the final consumers (patients) are not the only ones who make purchase decisions and make payment; behind the scene, there are other parties like retail pharmacies, doctors, and regulation authority, which make the network more complicated. This study mainly focuses on retail pharmacies as customer due to the impact of their purchasing decisionsto the overall financial success of the pharmaceutical companies
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