Supply Chain Visibility In Pharmaceutical Industry
Author: Murali Sundararajan, Associate Director, Global Life Sciences Practice, Intelligroup
The Pharmaceutical Industry Supply Chain is highly complex in nature because of the involvement of a huge number of stakeholders in the chain. Because of this complexity, the Pharmaceutical Supply Chain is the biggest challenge for the supply chain experts, as well as the pharmaceutical professionals.
Adding on to this, increased regulatory pressures across various therapeutics, the percentage of raw materials that are non-conforming to the requirement for manufacturing the drug has also increased multifold.
How will I reduce my raw material rejection rate by having better control on my supplier’s information? How will I improve the information flow between my manufacturing locations and the contract manufacturer? How will I have better visibility of the requirement of the patient / physician / hospitals? How will I plan my forecast of a specific drug, in a specific therapeutic segment, in a specific market? Is there a solution which helps in improving my logistics operations? And many more questions are swirling in the minds of operational managers in the pharmaceutical industry. The answer to most of these questions is – Yes, all these can be achieved by implementing a supply chain visibility solution.
Supply chain visibility is a key remedy to most of the challenges being faced by the supply chain team in the pharmaceutical industry. By having an efficient Enterprise Resource Planning application combined with a Business Intelligence tool with specific customized add-ons helps in improving the Supply chain visibility of the Pharmaceutical organization. This combined with the best in class tools built for supply chain helps organization to focus on the Supply Chain visibility and makes them stronger in the Operational focus and thereby improves the bottom-line drastically. Also Information Management and sharing of best practices plays a key role for organizations that have Global presence and have their drug distribution across various markets / regions. This also is heavily controlled by the prevailing regulations in the respective markets
Real time Supply chain visibility helps Pharmaceutical companies in improving their decision making capabilities and hence they move up the corporate ranking on implementing the same. It is also gaining a huge importance due to the growth of the organization because of several factors including new Therapeutic areas, markets, Mergers & Acquisitions and so on. Many success stories back these requirements for real time Supply chain visibility solutions.
Some of the key elements of the Pharmaceutical Supply chain visibility solution include Flexible and alternate Production scheduling / synthesis, Efficient Distribution systems, Near zero Inventory planning and control and Real time decision making. Because of these key elements, Supply chain visibility is not only gaining importance in Operational focus but also on the Strategic viewpoint of the organization.
Will Supply Chain Visibility be on the radar of the CxOs of Large / Medium Pharmaceutical companies across the Globe? The answer is YES. Most of the Large and Medium Pharmaceutical players do have an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) application which controls the Supply chain operations to a large extent. But ERP systems combined with Supply Chain Visibility solution is the need of the hour and such integrations are made much efficiently.
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Tags: Life Sciences, Pharma, Pharmaceuticals, Supply Chain