In the dietary supplement market—characterized by relentless growth and intensifying competition—a game-changing solution has emerged. This shift stems from transforming previously unavailable database-ready data sources, then visualizing the insights using Business Intelligence tools, specifically Qlik.
Why Qlik? Because it is a technologically mature solution, ensuring IT environment stability and ease of use, but above all because its licensing portfolio includes a model that enabled solution development independent of project diversity, usage contexts, and end-user counts. We are referring to the QAP (Qlik Analytics Platform) license and the first implementation of this type of solution in Poland.
And that is only the beginning! In this case, QAP opened the door to unexpected possibilities and benefits whose impact on solution development and communication with the solution’s audience is difficult to overestimate. This is not only an account of the boldness in implementing non-standard solutions such as Pharmdiver, but also an inspiration for those striving for change and excellence in this dynamic field.
Who is our client?
The company behind the creation of innovative Smart Supplement solutions is MAK Sp. z o.o., headquartered in Białystok. This is a company that, by securing funds from a project implemented under the Eastern Poland Operational Programme 2014-2020, undertook the ambitious task of creating an ecosystem enabling insight into ingredient patterns, relationships between ingredients, their quantities in preparations, etc. Some of these unique solutions are already available in the Pharmdiver Monitor tool, which is based on data from the “Register of Products Subject to Notification of First Placing on the Market” maintained by the Chief Sanitary Inspectorate.
To create and develop this innovative tool, MAK Sp. z o.o. assembled a multidisciplinary team of experts. This team is a true blend of knowledge and experience, combining specialists in data science, including big data and artificial intelligence, mathematicians, but above all pharmacy. Thanks to this, Pharmdiver Monitor not only came into being but also continues to evolve, delivering valuable solutions for the dietary supplement market and the pharmaceutical industry.
Supplement Market Challenges and Producer Obstacles
As the dietary supplement market evolves dynamically, producers encounter a range of challenges. Each introduction of a new supplement to the market involves risk, costs, and aspirations to stand out from the competition. The market is volatile, competition is growing—therefore, to achieve success, producers must act with precision.
A clear gap was visible in the dietary supplement market due to the lack of comprehensive qualitative and quantitative composition analyses of these products. There was no solution that could decompose supplement leaflets into more accessible data and identify significant dependencies between supplement product ingredients. It was precisely this gap in available tools and analyses that constituted the key motivation for seeking an innovative solution that could meet market needs and contribute to better understanding and comparison of ingredient patterns. Here are some of the key problems producers of supplements face:
- Lack of comprehensive composition analysis: producers lack tools enabling full analysis of supplement compositions across an entire category, which constitutes a significant barrier in assessing the quality and quantity of products in the competitive environment. This work is currently largely manual and sporadic.
- Ineffective competitiveness: competing in the market becomes more difficult because the lack of tools for precise composition comparison limits the ability to stand out from the competition in an objective and scalable manner, both before the pharmacist and the consumer.
- Non-standardized information from the GIS Register: Data on compositions available in the GIS register are often presented in an illegible form, requiring standardization work, which lengthens the qualitative analysis process.
- Lack of composition decomposition from leaflets: Enterprises struggle with the lack of tools for decomposing compositions from leaflets of existing products, which limits their ability to draw holistic conclusions and effectively position their own preparations.
- Manual data work: The process of analyzing and comparing composition data has been labor-intensive and required manual data processing, as well as independent acquisition of much information.
In this context, Business Intelligence (BI) tools and the Pharmdiver Monitor application bring new possibilities and change the way supplement producers can address these challenges.
Pharmdiver Monitor: A New Method for Analyzing Ingredient Patterns in Dietary Supplements and Beyond
The Pharmdiver solution represents an innovative approach to processing data on supplements that appear on the Chief Sanitary Inspectorate (GIS) website as part of the “Register of Products Subject to Notification of First Placing on the Market.” Often, data on supplement composition do not meet established standards and contain ambiguous and potentially imprecise information, particularly regarding ingredient naming conventions, of which there are nearly 4,000. The Pharmdiver solution involves comparing data presented on GIS pages with internally developed ingredient dictionaries, matching and standardizing information about the product and its composition. This process enables decomposition of the entire product into its ingredients in a standardized format.
Data are presented effectively, enabling understanding of the direction in which the supplement market is heading. Without this solution, it would be difficult to obtain a complete market overview, given the semi-structured nature of the data. Even if someone attempted to manually download and process this data, the sheer volume of text—amounting to 25,000 pages—would make this task extremely difficult and require significant financial investment.
The team of experts who worked on the project achieved impressive results. They not only created an extensive, multidimensional dictionary containing nearly 4,000 ingredients, but also analyzed 60,000 products in terms of their composition and the synergisms and antagonisms occurring within them.
This solution is important not only for composing thoughtful formulations, but also for companies in an active growth phase, as it allows them to anticipate market trends and prepare accordingly for changes. And there are more and more of these, particularly in the context of medication review, which only pharmacists have the right and competence to perform.
QAP: Looking Beyond the Horizon
In creating the Pharmdiver Monitor application, Qlik Sense played a key role—meeting numerous requirements related to IT system architecture and the vision for developing business solutions that go beyond the market standard. The search was for the ability to meet needs related to application functionality while avoiding a costly and complex licensing model. It turned out that QAP is a well-thought-out solution that meets growing requirements in the area of embedded analytics. Its goal is to expand the capabilities and flexibility of Qlik Sense at every level of the organization and, above all, beyond it. By leveraging the same innovative associative engine that powers all products under the Qlik brand, developers gain unparalleled freedom in creating exactly the solutions they need. Support is provided through a wide range of modern, open, and standard APIs—including Mashup API, Extensions API, Engine API, and dedicated APIs for infrastructure management.
The fundamental challenge we faced was the need to choose an implementation model for the solution with too many unknowns—says Rafał Piotrowski, CTO. We knew we had to present data to the target audience in an attractive form, allowing for a wide range of interactions, while not overwhelming them with the amount or method of configuration. Not knowing the target scope of data we would need to collect, process, and present, it was extremely difficult to estimate the total labor required to build an interface based, for example, on Open Source data visualization libraries and custom code—the risk of high frequency and scope of changes was too great. QlikSense came to the rescue, allowing for dynamic introduction of changes and very efficient mapping of them in the front-end application using dynamically generated JS libraries. Moreover, thanks to the licensing model we chose, we have the ability to embed dynamically generated QlikSense elements not only for users covered by named user licenses (as in the case of standard licenses), but also for anonymous users. Not knowing the target amount of display time for QlikSense elements, we were unable to estimate cloud model licensing with sufficient certainty. All these problems were solved by the QlikSense Enterprise licensing model, and the only barrier in the context of the scope of QlikSense use became at this point the physical performance of the server on which the environment was launched.
The Qlik Sense platform was deemed optimal because it allows for the creation of an interactive and dynamic data analysis environment. This tool enabled the creation of visualizations and their sharing in a way that allowed end users to work with data intuitively and efficiently. Thanks to Qlik Sense, it is possible to deliver application updates that users see immediately, allowing them to use new features on an ongoing basis.
It is worth quoting here also the statement of Bartosz Staniów—Head of Analytics at MAK
“The main innovation in our project is the use of QlikSense based on an innovative licensing model, which relies on the first implementation in Poland of the QAP (Qlik Analytics Platform) environment. Thanks to this approach, access to visualization objects in the QlikSense environment is now possible anonymously, without the need to authenticate users on the QlikSense side. This solution brings obvious benefits, but also entails far-reaching consequences. Under the QAP model, there is no traditional hub, and applications must first be created in the classic QlikSense Enterprise environment, then imported into the QAP environment. Then, based on them, interactive mashups are generated, for example using the Mashup Editor tool found in DevHub. These mashups use ready-made Qlik objects and are made available to clients on our site monitor.smartsupplement.pl. Although this solution is technically more demanding than traditional licensing, it brings incredible flexibility and opens up completely new, previously unknown possibilities for the QlikSense environment.”
A key aspect of Qlik Sense is also its flexibility and the chosen licensing method, namely QAP. There is no need to worry about user licenses, which gives complete freedom in adapting to the number and needs of clients. Thanks to Qlik Sense, application creators can perform tasks that in other tools, requiring advanced programming, would be difficult or even impossible to accomplish. The Qlik Sense interface and the way functionality is delivered are key factors that contributed to the user-friendly nature of the Pharmdiver Monitor application.
The Benefits Are Clear
Pharmdiver delivers a solution that helps understand the supplement market, identify opportunities and risks, and make strategic business decisions. By using the Pharmdiver Monitor solution, a company has above all the ability to adapt its strategy to dynamic changes in the dietary supplement market. This is a key aspect that allows avoiding surprises and staying one step ahead of the competition. Thanks to Pharmdiver, you can properly prepare for changes, adjust marketing campaigns, and even improve the composition of existing products. It also allows you to draw attention to the potential for implementing new products that suddenly gain popularity. If, for example, you see that a certain ingredient is becoming increasingly desired among consumers, you can consider introducing a product containing that very ingredient. Pharmdiver enables precise monitoring of these changes and making sound business decisions, which translates into real competitive advantages in the dietary supplement market. Thanks to Pharmdiver, you can:
- review summaries of notifications from the past week: This allows you to find out which producers want to strongly mark their position in the supplement market.
- observe changes in ingredient popularity: Pharmdiver Monitor allows monitoring of ingredient popularity measured by the number of first-placing-on-the-market notifications, which helps in making sound business decisions.
- compare product compositions: This tool enables comparison of product compositions on a broad scale, which allows for precise understanding of differences between them, as well as identification of similarities.
- export data and create custom compilations: You can export data from Smart Supplement and create your own compilations, tailored to your company’s needs.
- save time on manual data processing: Pharmdiver eliminates labor-intensive manual data processing, which saves valuable time.
- draw conclusions faster than others: Thanks to easy access to comprehensive data, you can draw conclusions and make decisions faster than the competition.
These benefits make Pharmdiver an indispensable tool for companies operating in the supplement market, allowing them to effectively analyze and respond to changes in the industry, particularly in focusing potential for new ingredient compositions already at the level of producer intent.
Pharmdiver addresses challenges by providing tools that allow understanding the supplement market, identifying opportunities and risks, and making strategic business decisions. Thanks to this solution, producers can stay one step ahead of the competition and effectively introduce innovative products to the market.
Pharmdiver Monitor is the first tool in the palette of intelligent solutions being developed by the MAK team. The next step is an innovative system that will allow checking and comparing dietary supplement compositions using content contained on product leaflets, as well as metadata from other sources, and detecting potential interactions between them and medications or herbs.