When we started talking to independent pharmacy owners in Sao Paulo about how they buy stock, one thing became obvious quickly: nobody had ever sat down and measured how long the process actually takes. Everyone knew it was time-consuming. Nobody had looked at it systematically.
We asked pharmacy owners to track their procurement activities over two weeks. Not pharmaceutical knowledge time, not patient-facing time: specifically the time spent getting quotes, placing orders, following up on orders, and resolving discrepancies with distributors. The results were consistently higher than people expected before they measured.
What the Time Goes Into
A typical ordering cycle for an independent pharmacy with three to five distributor relationships involves several distinct activities. First, there is the initial round of calls: calling each distributor to ask about prices and availability for the products you need to restock. A rep may answer immediately, or you may need to call back, or they may call you. Products that are in short supply require additional calls to confirm that the distributor actually has stock and can commit to delivery.
Then there are the follow-up calls. An order was placed yesterday and should have shipped this morning; you need to confirm it did. A product arrived and the quantity is short; you need to call the distributor and get that corrected on the nota fiscal. A price that was quoted verbally over the phone does not match what appeared on the nota fiscal; you need to resolve that discrepancy before you can process the invoice correctly.
Finally, there is the ongoing relationship maintenance: returning calls from reps who want to inform you about promotions or product launches, listening to sales pitches for products you do not currently stock, managing the back-and-forth of credit terms and payment scheduling that often happens verbally between the pharmacy owner and the distributor's accounts team.
When you add these up across a week, a pharmacy dealing with four or five distributors and placing two or three orders per week can easily accumulate five to eight hours of procurement-related communication time. For a pharmacy with a single owner managing operations personally, that is a significant fraction of the operational workload.
The Opportunity Cost Problem
The cost of this time is not just the clock hours. It is the opportunity cost: what else could that person have been doing during the time they spent on procurement phone calls.
For an owner-operated pharmacy, the time spent calling distributors is time not spent with patients, not spent managing staff, not spent reviewing what is actually selling and what is sitting on the shelf. For a larger independent pharmacy with a designated pharmacy technician doing most of the ordering, it is staff time that could have been directed toward customer service or inventory management.
The opportunity cost calculation is genuinely difficult to nail down precisely because it depends on what the alternatives actually are in a given pharmacy's context. We are not claiming that every hour spent on procurement calls is an hour that could have directly generated measurable revenue. In a slow period, the counterfactual might just be less-stressed downtime. But in a busy period, it is real diversion from patient-facing work, and patient-facing work is the core of a pharmacy's value proposition to its community.
The Information Quality Problem
There is a second cost embedded in phone-based procurement that is harder to measure but arguably more important: the information quality cost. A pharmacy making purchasing decisions based on whatever prices were verbally quoted in the last round of calls is making decisions with a partial picture of the market.
The rep you spoke to from Distributor A this morning quoted you a price for metformin 500mg. You do not know what Distributor B would have quoted you for the same product because you have not called them yet, and you may not have time to call them before you need to confirm the order. You end up accepting the first reasonable-sounding price because the alternative is another set of phone calls that might or might not produce a meaningfully better offer.
This is a rational response to time constraints, but it compounds over dozens of products and dozens of ordering cycles into a systematic pattern of not finding the best available price. The dollars do not show up as a line item in any accounts payable report, but they are real: the difference between the price you paid and the best available market price, summed across products and cycles.
The Vendor Lock-In Pattern
There is a third dynamic that compounds the time cost: because phone-based procurement is time-intensive, pharmacies naturally reduce the number of distributors they actively work with. Maintaining a relationship with Distributor C requires answering their rep's calls, remembering their contact, placing occasional orders to keep the relationship active, and dealing with their invoicing quirks. It is friction. So over time, many independent pharmacies consolidate to two or three distributors they know well and stop actively exploring alternatives.
This consolidation is rational given the procurement channel, but it increases dependence on a small number of suppliers and reduces competitive pressure on the pricing they receive. The pharmacy is not choosing limited competition: it is a side effect of the high friction of maintaining multiple relationships through a phone-based channel.
A digital channel lowers the cost of accessing a broader distributor set. You do not need to maintain a personal relationship with every distributor whose prices you can see on a platform. The friction of comparison falls, which means the natural consolidation to a small preferred supplier set does not happen as quickly or as completely.
What a Different Process Looks Like
The alternative to phone-based procurement is not eliminating distributor relationships. It is changing the channel for price discovery and order placement while preserving the relationship elements that have genuine value.
Price discovery, specifically, does not require a phone call. It requires knowing what a product costs from a given distributor at a given time. That information can be presented digitally, checked in under a minute, and compared across several distributors simultaneously. The 45 minutes you spend calling three distributor reps to get three price quotes on five products can be replaced by a five-minute search that shows you current prices from ten distributors simultaneously.
The elements of distributor relationships that do have unique value, the credit flexibility, the heads-up on incoming shortages, the accountability when something goes wrong, are still present in a hybrid model. You still work with your distributors. You just do not use the phone for tasks where the phone adds friction without adding value.
Measuring Your Own Procurement Time
The most useful thing a pharmacy owner can do before evaluating any procurement tool is to actually measure the current time cost. Keep a log for two weeks: every phone call to a distributor, how long it took, what it was for. Include follow-up calls, dispute resolution, relationship maintenance calls from incoming reps. Add it up.
Most owners who go through this exercise are surprised by the total. The surprise is useful: it provides a real baseline against which to evaluate whether any change in process generates a genuine time saving or just shifts the friction to a different form. A procurement platform that takes as long to use as the phone calls it replaces has not solved the problem. One that genuinely compresses the time required, while maintaining or improving the information quality, has.
We built Covalenty with this specific measurement in mind. The benchmark we hold ourselves to is not whether it is faster than calling one distributor: it is whether it is faster than calling all the distributors you would need to call to get the same quality of information. That is the relevant comparison, and it is the one worth making before deciding whether to change anything about how you buy stock.
