Pharmaceutical Supply Chain

ENABLEMENT:

Before pharma companies can analyze how effective their supply chain really is, they will need to have clear, end-to-end visibility of their global supply chains linking strategy, performance, management and risk. At a simple glance, this begins with basic metrics and reporting, as these tools provide the backbone of data for performance measurements. Enablement can occur in three areas:

• Demand Visibility: Poor forecast accuracy and demand volatility continue to challenge drug companies due to sub-optimized sales and operations planning (S&OP) processes. There is a need to make basic forecasting metrics more visible to enable replenishment; KPIs such as forecast accuracy, forecast bias, and On Time-In-Full can be very quickly deployed and will help measure the pulse in the supply chain planning domain.
• Inventory Visibility: From KPI dashboards with multi-dimensional drill-down to analytics enabling near real-time inventory tracking and tracing for controlled drugs, we can handle it all. Analytics in this space include inventory variance analysis, inventory revaluation, inventory reporting, gross-to-net inventory bridge, days on hand, as well as inventory usability for obsolescence purposes.
• Transportation Analytics: Drug companies can realize immense performance improvement opportunities through analytics-driven activities such as improved visibility for in-transit goods, freight lane reporting, fleet sizing, load planning, and freight cost consolidation. A quick win here would be to target freight lanes that create imbalances over time and identifying which route supports the business and which ones do not.

EFFECTIVENESS: 

Decisions can only be as good as the data coming through. We help you build effective supply chain with appropriate, consistent movement of data up and down the supply chain.  

• Manufacturing Analytics: Bringing data under a single umbrella becomes a powerhouse for driving process improvement in the manufacturing space in conjunction with compliance to the ever-changing regulatory guidelines. Real-time measurements of process parameters allow drug manufacturers to leverage advanced statistical analytical methods to monitor and correct process conditions before a potential quality failure occurs. 
• Network Optimization: Network design is a powerful, analytics-driven modeling approach proven to deliver significant reduction in supply costs and customer service-level improvements. Cost-based analytics focused on KPIs such as investment cost; return on investment; sunk costs; stock costs; transportation costs; etc. can help you choose between a centralized and a decentralized network design model.  

EARNINGS

A positive working capital ratio is essential for pharma companies to be able to operate profitably, service its debt, and fund upcoming operational expenses. Supply chain analytics can play a huge role in the active management of working capital. The focus on achieving a high-quality balance sheet requires granular level cost information at every point in the supply chain by product, by distribution channel, and by customer. Quantifying these cost differences can help a company discontinue an unprofitable product, alter a distribution network to increase profitability, and then redeploy the freed up capital towards new drug research or towards other innovations.