Arjun realized the MIS had no field for retailer anxiety . No column for patient self-medication . No variable for regulatory trauma .
He walked out of the data entry room, past the janitor who had stopped humming, past the empty cubicles, past the motivational posters that said “Data is the new science.”
Someone was entering fake prescriptions into the system to game the CRM.
The drug was called Nebuflam-D . A fixed-dose combination of an expectorant, a low-dose steroid, and a novel mucolytic. It was supposed to be a blockbuster for chronic bronchitis. The clinical trials were solid. The pricing was aggressive. The sales force was incentivized to the teeth. Fdc Sales Mis
A pattern emerged.
But who? A rep desperate to meet target? A stockist colluding with a retailer? Or the MIS itself—not the software, but the people who controlled what data entered it.
Arjun stared at the glowing screen in his cubicle at 9:47 PM. The office was empty except for the janitor, who hummed an old Hindi film tune while mopping the corridor. On Arjun’s monitor, a cascade of numbers scrolled silently: units sold, doctor prescriptions, stockist balances, tertiary sales, secondary sales, primary sales. Arjun realized the MIS had no field for retailer anxiety
Arjun picked up his phone and called the rep. “Rajesh, Dr. Iyengar—did she prescribe Nebuflam-D in week one?”
Palpitations. The steroid component had a known but rare cardiac risk. In clinical trials, it occurred in 0.3% of patients. But if even one patient reported it to a senior doctor like Iyengar, she would blacklist the FDC forever. The MIS, however, would not capture why she stopped. It would only show a line descending. Numbers without stories were dangerous.
Arjun had been a regional sales manager for eleven years. He had seen doctors change prescription habits, drug reps morph into digital avatars, and CRM tools evolve from paper diaries to AI-driven dashboards. But nothing—nothing—had prepared him for the silence that came after the launch of the new FDC. He walked out of the data entry room,
“And week three?”
He returned to his dashboard the next morning. The system had automatically generated a stock ageing report for Nebuflam-D. It showed that 34% of inventory at the stockist level was within 60 days of expiry. The algorithm flagged it as “moderate risk.” But what the algorithm didn’t say was that Suresh was planning to return those batches next week, triggering a cascade of negative entries that would nuke the zone’s incentive payouts for the quarter.
He understood then what FDC sales MIS really was. Not a tool. Not a system. A mirror. And what it reflected was not the market, but the fear inside the people who sold drugs: fear of failure, fear of being fired, fear of a flat green line.
And yet, week four of the launch, the MIS dashboard showed a flat green line where a hockey stick should have been.
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.