Supply Chain Collaboration

Business Challenges for the Global Supply Chain

Products stuck in quarantine due to miscommunication of compliance interpretations, excessively long time-to-market for new product introductions, elevated channel safety stock levels that still leave unacceptable out-of-stock rates, poor customer-service levels. These are just some of the negative impacts of failing to efficiently collaborate throughout the supply network.

Globalization initiatives which increase channel complexity only turn up the pressure as companies try to reshape reactive supply chains into competitive weapons that help orchestrate corporate response to customer demand signals. By building a cross-functional, demand-driven organization that closely collaborates with trading partners, the benefits can be numerous including synchronized sales and operations planning, reduced friction as new markets or go-to-market channels are pursued, and decreased costs across the board. The question is: How should the enterprise IT infrastructure and trade relationship be shaped to facilitate the transparency, accuracy, and timeliness of information and decision-making required to be a globally agile organization?

Collaboration Questions for a Serialized Product World

As today’s life sciences supply chain starts to grapple with the question of how to manage product serialization on a global scale, new opportunities are presented to help companies create a truly collaborative supply chain, one that can execute on shared business processes between individual trading pairs or across an entire trade network numbering in the thousands. To realize this future, however, companies will have to first tackle the core questions of how to prepare and build their own capabilities. In addition, the coordination process with the trade network will have to be looked at closely to ensure that a company fully analyzes partners’ expectations and plans appropriately for interoperability. Based on the results of industry pilots and studies with dozens of companies who have looked into the issues, several facets need to be considered as an actionable strategy is developed. These include:

• Number and Location of Trade Partners  How many downstream customers and upstream suppliers will need to be connected? Are these partners in the same geography or do cross-border issues come into play?
• Types of Trade Partners  What kinds of trade partners need to be engaged as part of the business process? Are certain business operations outsourced such as manufacturing, packaging, or distribution?
• Alignment of Business Expectations  What kind of business processes, such as shipping serialized products/cases, sharing pedigree data, and reimbursing for financial claims are executed upon between the company and its partners? How synchronized are you and your partners on any regulatory interpretations that may come into play, such as who needs to initiate and update a pedigree? What physical product expectations exist, such as product labeling specifications and data carrier selection?
• Internal Business Operations  What are the range of internal processes that are touched by new system development? Are products repackaged or kitted? Do intra-company transfers occur as a normal course of business? Can inference be relied upon within receiving, inventory, and shipping operations?
• Infrastructure Readiness of Partners  What methods of data transport will be needed between internal enterprise systems and those of the trading partner’s? Can you rely on creating one single protocol or will many be required? Is the trade partner capable of sharing business process information or will they need to leverage a portal?
• Alignment of Data  What kinds of data are you preparing to send for the selected business process, such as serialization, pedigree, EDI 844 chargeback claims, etc.? Is there common agreement on the exact format of the data stream or will you have to contend with potentially different formats between partners for elements such as serial numbers and Tag IDs? What impacts on internal operational and enterprise IT systems will this diversity have?
• Interoperability Testing  What coordination and communication plans are required to ensure that testing and go-live on shared processes come off without a hitch? What product, process, and data issues need to be included in the interoperability test program? How much time should be set aside for this program given hundreds or thousands of trade partners that may be affected?
• Managing Transitional Landscapes  Even as plans are made for today’s business and regulatory environment, what kinds of changes in this environment are envisioned over the next 5 to 10 years? What kinds of operational flexibility may be needed to support business strategies such as opening new markets, introducing new products, or acquiring new companies? How will these business strategies change the trading partner network?

SupplyScape Solutions for Supply Chain Collaboration

Building a flexible business operation that supports supply chain collaboration is tough. Companies looking to improve their supply chain collaboration, to create new inter-company business growth opportunities or to decrease the cost of on-ramping their entire global trade network for compliance, can look to SupplyScape for insight and solutions. SupplyScape leverages knowledge drawn from designing some of the world’s largest supply chains coupled with hands-on experience creating global serialization products for hundreds of pharmaceutical product lines to feed our product solutions and business services. Selected designed to help companies kick-start their supply chain collaboration include:

Strategy Consulting and Planning
SupplyScape’s Strategic Consulting helps companies maximize business opportunity and reduce compliance risk as they design and invest in global serialization and international supply networks. 

Global Supply Chain Collaboration
SupplyScape’s Nexus provides a network-based data sharing and business collaboration service foundation that drastically reduces the friction of connecting companies to their trading partners and business users to supply chain insight through shared business processes using serialization, pedigree, and other supply chain information.

Serialization and Serialized Product Pedigree Solutions
SupplyScape’s Product Security suite delivers an integrated serialized product and pedigree track and trace solution for companies at all points in the supply chain from manufacture and packaging to dispensation.