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TRANZILA PRESENTS  MONEY OVER IP TRANZILA enables MagenDavidMeds.com to merge the traditional brick & mortar pharmacy business practices with the real-time, online world of an Internet pharmacy. A Q&A interview with the Canadian businessman, Nathan Jacobson and the Israeli Major General (Res.) Doron Almog the managers of MagenDavidMeds.com. There has been a great deal of media hype over the US Pharmaceutical market and the challenge it faces in light of significant penetration of Canadian drug suppliers to the US market. Canadian suppliers are taking advantage of the price gaps between the US free market and prices in countries that regulate drug prices., Following in the footsteps of the tremendous success of many Canadian drug suppliers, Nathan Jacobson, a high profile Canadian businessman and Israeli Major General (Res.) Doron Almog, have put together a new initiative to supply competitively priced drugs to the US market, but this time, based out of Israel. Their goal is to leverage the tightly regulated pricing structure of prescription medicines in Israel and to provide millions of American patients with easily available and more affordable solution for acquiring the drugs they need. The company is based on an off-shore Israeli Internet infrastructure. The venture faced many challenges. Moving from the conventional hand scribbled prescriptions that patients usually receive from their doctors to today's on-line world; Choosing TRANZILA as the service platform that manages the billing and payments turned out to be a key contributor for the ventures' success. What lies in the future? The entrepreneurs are hoping for more automation, integration and expansion of the US-Canada-Israeli triangle. Meanwhile, TRANZILA’s developers are continuously working to meet the challenges faced by their customers and are dedicated to keeping them at the forefront of payment management over IP. How would you categorize the move to accepting on line payments? Doron Almog: "In terms of the venture, the move was not just about a technological upgrade. The major benefit of connecting to TRANZILA was the adaptation of our organization to today’s mindset that everything is done here and now. E-business has come of age and is no longer an empty slogan. To succeed today, businesses need to provide immediate service to fulfill online and telephone orders. Working with TRANZILA allows our entire organization to respond in real time. Order management, payment confirmation, credit processing and even invoicing are handled automatically by TRANZILA. Our clients are the main beneficiaries of this streamlined service. They enjoy faster, more reliable and accurate service." Where you worried about accepting payments and providing service through the Internet? Nathan Jacobson: " The move from a traditional brick and mortar business to the on-line world has raised few concerns. But after a thorough system test, the concern over possible data compromise and data integrity were quickly relieved. In fact, when we took an analytical approach to our concerns, we recognized that the challenges of the transition can be handled as an opportunity to achieve higher standards of operation within our organization. Furthermore, our concerns about high operational expenses were dismissed. TRANZILA delivered a billing system solution that is reasonably priced. The only remaining worry at that point was about integrating all the processes into a working system."

	Retrospectively, how would you describe the integration? Nathan Jacobson: "The integration process was fast and smooth. Adopting We found TRANZILA to be highly user friendly. Since TRANZILA works in the service mode, no installation of special hardware or software was required on our end. Our call center reps are using standard PC's and Internet browsers. The entire system maintenance is managed by TRANZILA's engineers; we don't have to worry about any of this stuff. From the second an order is being accepted by our call center or by the Internet, all aspects of payment, processing, invoicing and interfacing with the credit card companies, is managed for us." How would you summarize the implications of providing on-line service? Doron Almog: "Each and every part of our organization had to get aligned with the speed and efficiency of the Internet. TRANZILA provided our management with a transparent view of the sales flow via a friendly web based interface. We can also look at sales history reports, comparison graphs and analyses. The operation staff receives instant updates on the accepted and rejected orders and can fulfill them immediately. Accounting automatically receives reports on invoices issued and if needed, export data to our ERP system. We've learned to utilize these management and control capabilities. Our decision-making is much more intelligent and we begin to see how the system will contribute to improved marketing efforts. We can code and identify various sales efforts. The multilayered structure of TRANZILA provides secure and departmentalized access to transaction information. We can customize access to information by department, for example. We also restrict control panel access to the physical office location and thus, better protect our data." Can you assess the move to on-line operations in terms of ROI? Doron Almog: "Since our response time is immediate, each transaction is being processed by the credit card companies in real time. There is no need to wait for slow and lengthy confirmation process like in POS terminals. The benefits of better service, efficiency and security are clear. The system dismisses the need for manual reporting or manual handling of money and paperwork between the point of sales and the headquarters. This improves the efficiency tremendously and amounts to significant administrative savings. The electronic archiving of the transactions history and the elaborate search capabilities, overcome the problems associated with the paper era, such as loss of transaction records. Our "hands free" operation improves security. This also translates to savings on administrative manpower and savings on the dialup expenses of the old POS machines. Paper piles, slips and stacks of faxes now belong to our pantheon." What type of service trends do you think the Internet can help fulfill in the future and how does it fit to your business vision? Nathan Jacobson:" In some ways, the future is already here. By synergizing our systems to TRANZILA, we enjoy an impressive array of management abilities which correspond to our current business model. But this just increases our appetite for more innovations and initiatives, especially on the business level where, I predict, the most interesting developments in the near future will take place. Now that we have a strong technical foundation to rely on, we can initiate more aggressive e-business ventures." From Information Week January 10th 2005.