How Medimpex Pharmaceuticals Ltd. digitized its GDP training

In brief

Medimpex delivers 60–80 training sessions a year, either in person or for information purposes. Whenever a standard operating procedure (SOP) is revised, the format of the training is determined by the scale and significance of the change and by the job role. The company therefore distinguishes between in-person training and information-only training, the latter currently delivered electronically by email. Every training session was tracked in a signed training log and in an Excel spreadsheet, where each session is identified by a sequential number.

Today a significant share of standard operating procedures and of GDP and ISO training runs on EduBase: with centrally stored documents, a practice test, an exam, and certificates issued and recorded digitally. This gives quality assurance a retrievable record of who completed what, when, and with what result.

The starting point

Pharmaceutical wholesale distribution operates within the framework of Good Distribution Practice (GDP), which requires every member of staff to receive initial and continuing training appropriate to their duties. At Medimpex, training follows a documented, written training program prepared by February 15 each year. Ad hoc training sessions also come up, and the depth of the training can differ from one role to another.

On top of day-to-day work, keeping SOPs current and communicating revisions on time takes considerable effort at Medimpex. When an SOP is revised, the change must reach every affected employee, and it has to be demonstrated in documented form that they have read it.

Training used to be delivered as a presentation, followed by an oral or written assessment — written being the preferred of the two. Notice of document revisions went out by email. But no easily searchable record was created of who opened those emails and who read them. This is the natural limit of paper and email.

The record consisted of the signed training log and an Excel spreadsheet. No certificate was produced in the digital form used today.

This setup will look familiar anywhere recurring training runs and the record is assembled from emails, a signed log, and an Excel spreadsheet.

Why they started

The need for an electronic training platform came from management, and the trigger was practical: electronic proof that training is traceable, flexibility in completing training, the ability to extract statistics, and the issuing of certificates. The goal was therefore concrete: a user-friendly platform that lets employees complete the required training on their own, within the given deadline and around their own schedule.

It was also important that every training module be paired with an exam confirming that the knowledge acquired during the training had been checked. Once the exam is passed, a certificate can then be issued.

From a quality assurance perspective, a further goal was to handle the roughly 60–80 training sessions a year with as little manual work and administration as possible, making the process more efficient, more transparent, and easier to trace.

At the start of every year, under ISO, the departments have to set quality objectives for that year. For 2026, one of the objectives of Quality Assurance was to reform and digitize training.

How they use it today

• A document library for SOPs. Standard operating procedures, forms, revisions to those documents, and internal policies are published on EduBase. Quality assurance can see who viewed which document and when. Deadlines are tracked the same way.
• Certificates. These have existed since EduBase was introduced; before that, the training log served this purpose. A certificate also shows how long the given training remains valid.
• Notifications. Employees are notified automatically of the tasks and exams that are due.
• Practice test and exam. The practice test has a role of its own: it lets employees get to know the platform instead of meeting it for the first time in the real exam. The trainer can set it up as an optional step. The exam follows and passing it produces a digital certificate.
• Not only quality assurance. Whenever a management or departmental policy takes effect or is amended, the affected employees have to be informed of the change; this happens on the same platform. One example from IT is publishing the materials needed for the NIS2 audit and the Information Security Policy.

For now, the Excel record remains in place alongside EduBase; the two records are kept in parallel. (The Excel record is still needed because digital training is not yet possible for some people, for lack of a device. Their training also has to be documented in some form.) Medimpex's future goal is to track training solely on EduBase.

What changed

• Immediate results. Exams no longer have to be graded by hand — the result is there the moment the exam is submitted.
• Own pace. Everyone completes recurring training when it fits into their working day — within the deadline. Internal feedback on this is distinctly positive: nobody has to sit in a training session at a fixed time.
• Traceability. The date and content of each revision can be looked up electronically; there is no need to reconstruct what happened when from an email archive. Completed exams cannot be deleted, so every training event and its documentation remain retrievable and traceable.
• In one place. During an audit, the training record no longer has to be gathered from several sources. That makes it easier and faster to present.

The biggest gain is not the time saved

The savings differ by type of training:

The lasting gain arises elsewhere: training that has taken place can be proven afterward with a simple search.

The platform is currently used about four or five times a month.

The first audit with the new system

Medimpex went through an ISO 9001:2015 audit in the spring of 2026. The auditor was shown the EduBase platform: how materials are uploaded, how the practice test and the exam work, what the certificate looks like, and how it is visible who viewed each document.

The feedback was that they are moving in the right direction with this digitization, and the audit report closed positively. The report included the following observation:

"The new electronic system for managing training substantially supports efficiency." (translated from Hungarian)

What comes next

The longer-term goal is for all training to take place on EduBase; that would take a considerable workload off the team. Use of the platform continues to expand, and quality assurance sees potential in the following directions:

• Bringing in warehouse staff. They do not have their own computers, but they do have smartphones — the plan is to make the tests available that way.
• Extending to partners. Involving logistics partners in the testing has also come up.
• Training new hires. The longer-term idea is material detailed enough that an in-person session becomes the exception rather than the default.
• A per-person overview. Every audit comes back to the same question: which training a given employee took, with what result, and when; being able to show that quickly matters. Today this can be produced from EduBase reports, and a personalized competence view is under development.
• Training matrix. Mapping the existing training matrix has also been discussed: uploading every SOP, then assigning them person by person, marking whether a given item is information-only or requires an assessment.
• Annual questionnaires. The mandatory annual customer satisfaction survey and the supplier qualification questionnaire could be handled here as well.

About EduBase

EduBase is a Hungarian-built training, assessment, and competence management platform. It has been operating since 2016, and training has run on it at more than 200 companies to date.

In regulated industries — pharmaceutical distribution, aircraft maintenance, automotive, and occupational safety, among others — it supplies the layer that turns training delivered into a record that is easy to retrieve later: versioned content, measured exam results, serialized certificates, and an exportable history. It is not a quality management system and does not replace one — it covers the training and competence record layer.