Global Supply Chain Challenges
The life sciences global supply chain is unique. Understanding its unique attributes is a key to the creation of business strategies and daily operational plans that maximize business performance and optimize supply chain efficiency. Some of the underlying supply chain dynamics that companies contend with include:
- Products with direct impacts on consumer health if their safety and integrity is compromised during the supply chain distribution process
- Diversity in the physical nature, market risk, and volume of product types flowing through the supply chain that range from branded, biopharmaceutical, and generic drugs to medical devices and kits
- Significant governmental regulation on state, national, and international levels affecting both physical flows (manufacture, distribution, and dispensation) and financial flows (payments, reimbursements, etc.)
- Moderate channel collaboration due to technology standards that vary widely in maturity and adoption combined with data sharing and privacy concerns
- Complexity in product and information movement introduced by the mix of in-house and outsourced manufacturing, packaging, and distribution operations.
- Constrained operational flexibility given long manufacture cycle times and relatively high days-in-inventory levels throughout the channel
Opportunities from Information and Collaboration
For companies in the supply chain, where do the opportunities lie in this environment to invest in business processes or technologies which can increase business performance, reduce cost, or increase business flexibility? Two specific technology trends are now available for companies to leverage in increasing patient safety and growing business value:
- Rich integrated information. New global serialization initiatives now increase the depth of product information available within an organization and among supply chain participants. The emergence of EPCIS adoption enables access to granular events tied to the handling and movement of serialized product. Product pedigree solutions are being rolled out which contain detailed product information coupled with a complete history of product movement from manufacture to dispensation. The result is access to a completely new level of granular, precise product and supply network information linked to other business information such as financial transactions.
- Supply network collaboration. Inter-company barriers are breaking down as technology standards and new supply chain collaboration techniques are being adopted. The adoption of ePedigree data and EPCIS interface standards simplify data sharing. SaaS-based software solutions, rich Web 2.0-based portals, and frictionless connectivity solutions drawn from social networking models reduce the effort of integrating a collaborative supply chain network.
The emergence of a global supply chain that can leverage rich, granular business information flowing within the enterprise and over collaborative trading partner networks has created new opportunities in four key strategic areas:
