Knowledge is the most valuable asset of a pharmaceutical company. It is also seen through the ages that only those who make a systematic effort can acquire knowledge. Today, Knowledge management is a growing field of study. Several principles of management apply to knowledge management as well. One can go back to the time of the Hawthorne experiments to prove this point. It differs from other business processes, where only information handling is given much importance. On the other hand, knowledge management, particularly in the area of pharamaceuticals, requires expertise in several related fields. The context is quite complex and the task, enormous. Those firms which rely on knowledge management in the form of information sharing are sure to achieve competitive advantage. The area of knowledge management in the pharmaceutical industry raises more questions than one can give answers to. Is it about knowledge selling? Is it about knowledge storage or inventorying? Is it about a central facility? Should it be decentralized and the important fragments preserved? Is it to be electronic or on paper? This paper is a preliminary step in the ongoing study on the same subject. The paper also presents three simple theoritical models for information sharing, building a knowledge pool and for knowledge audit. There is scope for future improvements in the area. It is not uncommon for pharmaceutical firms to get bogged down by the amount of information they generate at each stage of their operations. This paper attempts a review of handling and sharing of knowledge or electronic data that is available to pharmaceutical firms and the need for introducing Knowledge Audit (KA) in these firms. Methods to achieve the same have also been suggested.

Knowledge management refers to systematic and explicit building, renewal, and application of knowledge to maximize an organization's effectiveness. People tend to ignore the importance of knowledge, including its core areas, unless these are legal or regulatory-based. Historically, it goes back to the time of emperor Ashoka, where there was a phenomenal compilation of Medical Records (MRs) of the various ailments that afflicted his subjects.

Healthcare services are under the watchful eyes of the Consumer Protection Act and case histories are of legal importance. But it does not end there. It encompasses a vast area of knowledge. It is not yet erased from the minds of the Indian populace what the country had gone through during the early 1990s when it was afflicted with the plague epidemic. Still, history is rife with examples of lost knowledge in several areas, such as agriculture, literature, theology, general science, etc. The list is endless. What is different about the current situation is that humans have developed technologies to safeguard knowledge. These technologies are multiple and even if one is lost, one can retrieve it from the other. For example, if it is lost from paper, it can be retrieved from the electronic media, such as computers, compact discs, the Internet, etc., and vice versa.

Knowledge Management Journal, Pharmaceutical Marketing, pharmaceutical companies, Research and Development, Information Technology solutions, Enterprise Resource Planning, ERP, Fast Moving Consumer Goods, FMCG, drug marketing, pharmaceutical industry, Intellectual Property Rights, Globalization, Customer Relationship Management, CRM, Organizational audit.