How Pharmatic gives pharmacies more freedom in choosing their terminals

The starting point: A flexible system for complete pharmacy management in Switzerland

Pharmatic AG is a company within the Ofac Group and develops IT solutions for Swiss pharmacies and drugstores. The company serves around 600 customers across Switzerland.

At the core of its offering is Tactil: a comprehensive management system that supports pharmacies with sales, inventory management, and ordering, among other things.

The software can also be connected to numerous other components of daily pharmacy operations — for example, inventory management systems, robots, printers, and card readers.

The challenge: Connecting POS terminals quickly and flexibly

Whether Worldline, Nexi, or other acquiring partners: which POS terminal a pharmacy uses is a decision made independently of the checkout or management software in use.

At the same time, pharmacies expect their card reader to be cleanly integrated into their system. Only this ensures a smooth, simple, and largely error-free sales process.

«For our customers, it’s essential that the card reader is fully integrated into Tactil. That way, there are no error-prone parallel processes, and all payment information stays within one system. This simplifies the sales process — and later, the accounting as well,» explains Camille Gradassi, CCO of the Ofac Group.

For Pharmatic, this meant that Tactil needed to be compatible with as many POS terminals as possible, so customers could freely choose their payment partner.
«We want to offer our customers a flexible, comprehensive solution for their daily pharmacy operations. That includes giving them as much flexibility as possible in choosing their card reader,» Camille Gradassi describes Pharmatic’s ambition.

«Of course, we could integrate each card reader ourselves for every integration. But the effort would be enormous each time. It requires very specific know-how that we can’t and don’t want to build up internally for every manufacturer and every model,» Camille Gradassi explains the central challenge.
Every direct integration comes with its own technical requirements. Different communication protocols, terminal versions, and configurations not only need to be integrated once, but also continuously maintained and updated.

The result: Fully integrated and tested within one to two days

The biggest benefit for Pharmatic is the significantly lower effort required to connect POS terminals to their own management system.

«For standard card readers, it usually takes just one to two days with Pepper until everything is fully integrated and tested. That saves us valuable development time with every integration,» explains Camille Gradassi.

This allows Pharmatic to roll out new terminal connections for its customers much faster. POS terminals and the management system can be brought into joint operation more quickly — without Pharmatic having to develop its own interface each time.

The resources freed up this way can be used elsewhere in a targeted manner — for example, for the further development of Tactil and the numerous features that support pharmacies in their daily operations.