Floor to our merchants: VIM
Camilla Caporusso, Marketing & Communication Manager at VIM
When was VIM founded and who is your business aimed at?
VIM Farmaceutici was established in 1962 in Matera by Dr. Pietro Motta, a pharmacist, with the goal of providing pharmacies in Italy’s Basilicata region with an efficient and widespread pharmaceutical distribution service.
What goals have you achieved and what key figures represent your business over the past year?
Starting as a small local company, VIM has significantly expanded over the years, extending its reach to almost the entire national territory. From a single warehouse, VIM now operates 11 warehouses and serves 5,000 clients, including pharmacies and para-pharmacies.
What are the cornerstones of your digital strategy? And which tools do you use to promote yourselves online?
In the digital realm, we have focused heavily on our new corporate website and email marketing, while only recently beginning to explore social media channels. Our current goal is not to acquire new leads through digital platforms, but rather to strengthen our relationships with existing customers by conveying our core values, enhancing brand awareness, and solidifying our brand reputation.
Let’s talk about pharmacies: how digital is this sector, and what challenges does it face?
The sector we operate in and the clients we work with have varying levels of digital readiness. Over the past year, significant progress has been made, but there is still a long way to go before we can consider the industry fully digital.
Serving a network of over 3,000 pharmacies requires significant organization. How is your logistics structured, and how quickly do orders arrive?
Logistics is the foundation of our business. Over the years, we have built an extensive distribution network with 11 warehouses located across various regions of Italy and approximately 200 couriers. Our 5,000 clients, including pharmacies and para-pharmacies, receive between 1 and 4 deliveries per day depending on their geographic location and proximity to our warehouses. Orders are processed within a few hours for those receiving four daily deliveries, and generally within 24 hours for clients with a single daily delivery.
How important are innovation and digitalization to your business?
Innovation is key to improving the efficiency and quality of the distribution process in our sector. Today, digitalization is a major focus for many companies, and VIM is no exception. Recently, to modernize the technology used in our warehouses, we have made significant investments by equipping two new facilities—in Milan and Salerno—with automated systems. Additionally, we have strengthened our HUB warehouse in Matera by expanding its storage capacity by over 75% and installing a new, more efficient automated system.
How much priority does your company give to payment management?
Payment management is extremely important, as it is for any company. Whenever we acquire a new client, before starting any collaboration, we conduct thorough checks that allow us to establish specific payment terms tailored to that client.
You activated MyBank just a few months ago, and already volumes and values have shown significant growth. How did MyBank become part of your business, and how do you use it?
We have been using MyBank since February 2020. The solution was recommended to us by the Intesa Sanpaolo Group during a meeting focused on managing our clients’ advance payments. We were looking for a way to speed up and digitize an administrative process that had previously been handled manually. That’s how we discovered MyBank. With the support of the agency managing our website (www.vim.it), we integrated MyBank into the private area reserved for each of our clients. This area already featured a purchasing section as an alternative to the pharmacy management system but lacked a solution for autonomous payment management.
Nine months after implementation, we have converted 50% of our advance payment clients to this solution and reached a monthly turnover of approximately €500,000, also observing an increase in the average revenue per client.
What results have you achieved with MyBank?
Our goal was to digitize and automate one of our administrative procedures to reduce processing times and optimize the use of human resources—and we have succeeded. Importantly, we achieved this without compromising the security of collections.
How digitally savvy are your counterparts, the pharmacies you work with? How has MyBank contributed to the digitalization of your administrative processes and those of your counterparts?
The introduction of advance payments via MyBank through the VIM website has enabled us to achieve significant digital milestones. Indirectly, we have successfully promoted one of our key channels: our website.
Initially, many of our pharmacy clients were hesitant to use the system. However, by enabling payment management through the web, we have overcome much of this resistance. Analytics data shows an increase in total visits, number of users, average session duration, and a decrease in bounce rate. Most notably, access to the private area of our site has tripled.
MyBank enables immediate payment collection and consequently improves working capital value. Do you use it in this way? Is this a lever you actively promote?
The MyBank service is reserved for clients to whom we cannot grant payment extensions due to high credit risk. Therefore, MyBank is primarily used to ensure payment certainty.
The information transmitted in real time with MyBank transfers allows for 100% automatic reconciliation. How does this feature facilitate your collection processes?
The introduction of MyBank transfers has allowed us to fully automate the accounting registration process for incoming payments.