“Arjun bhai, your Nebuflam-D is moving slow because the retailers are scared. Two months ago, the state drug controller banned another FDC—same steroid, different company. The wholesalers are still stuck with thirty lakhs of expired stock. So now, every time a retailer sees ‘low-dose steroid’ on a combo, they think: next ban . They order just one strip at a time. And the patient? If the doctor writes a combo, the patient asks the chemist, ‘Can I take just the expectorant alone?’ Then they buy half a course.”
“Yes sir, forty scripts. I saw them myself. She wrote them in front of me.”
And yet, week four of the launch, the MIS dashboard showed a flat green line where a hockey stick should have been.
That night, Arjun drove to the warehouse district to meet a stockist named Suresh. Suresh sat in a grease-stained office surrounded by cartons of antihypertensives and antacids. He was frank. Fdc Sales Mis
He pulled up the prescription trend for Dr. Meera Iyengar, a pulmonologist in the city’s top lung hospital. Her prescription numbers for Nebuflam-D had gone from zero to forty in the first week—after his star rep had visited her thrice—and then dropped to two in the third week. But the MIS showed zero patient redemptions from her prescriptions. That meant either patients weren’t buying it, or the prescriptions were never written.
And in the MIS, that whisper would never appear.
“Rajesh gave me these,” she whispered. “He said, ‘Just enter them. The system will never know. The expiry dates are old anyway.’” “Arjun bhai, your Nebuflam-D is moving slow because
Someone was entering fake prescriptions into the system to game the CRM.
Arjun walked to the data entry cubicle. A young woman named Pooja was manually uploading scanned prescription forms from field force. He asked to see the originals for Dr. Iyengar’s forty scripts from week one.
“And week three?”
Arjun realized the MIS had no field for retailer anxiety . No column for patient self-medication . No variable for regulatory trauma .
Arjun closed the drawer. He looked at the MIS dashboard on her screen—the same one his boss saw every morning. It glowed with confidence: green arrows, rising trends, forecast accuracy of 94%. None of it was real.
“Primary sales are strong,” his boss had said in the morning review. “But secondary is dead. The product is leaving our warehouse but not moving off pharmacy shelves.” So now, every time a retailer sees ‘low-dose
Arjun clicked into the MIS module that tracked prescription audits . The software was expensive, licensed from a US vendor, and meticulously built. It aggregated data from 1,200 chemists across his zone. Every time a bill was generated for Nebuflam-D, the system recorded it. Every time a doctor’s prescription was scanned at a pharmacy loyalty program, the system knew.