Digitization The Pharma Supply Chain

Supply chain is supposed to be a business backbone. Same goes for a pharmaceutical company. If the

supply chain fails, the company fails to deliver a qualitative product or in some cases any product at all.

Pharmaceutical supply chains also battle the same problems as any other business does. Except that a pharmaceutical supply chain is a bit complexed. It includes:

• Product quality

For raw materials that are fragile and if kept long in the way might get deteriorated.

• Product availability

Maintaining buffer inventories is not cost effective.

• Product security and contamination

For the materials which need special handling and those who are temperature sensitive.

• Cost and risk reduction

Trying to meet demanding business requirements you need to cut out overheads and overspends.

• Liabilities and ligitalities

When handling controlled substances, because no pharma wants a product on their shelves that is sub-par.

Digitization impacts many departments and concerns among logistics, security, quality, brand

perception and supply chain. Supply chain visibility can improve your customer loyalty, brand perception and the ability to predict issues, but it requires more discipline and data. With the ever growing digital age and shrinking margins the pharmaceuticals need to take help of the technology.

Benefits of a digitized supply chain

It is an automated and optimised set of processes that holds your supply chain together and uses the acquired data predictive analysis methods to improve the performance of the industry.

This process needs tie to evolve within the organisation. It is important to align the supply chain with business needs. The results improve overtime.

• Within 3 months you can achieve results fro analytics

• Within next 3 months end to end supply chain visibility can be improved

• Within a year you will be able to manage your supply chain and improve performance of the pharmaceutical industry.

Steps to digitize your pharma supply chain

Assess and evaluate your supply chain to figure out where visibility is lacking in the process.

Use automated tools to monitor the goods that start collecting data. This can provide you an insight of the process and its issues.

Once the required data is received, build a digitised infrastructure to improve overall performance of the unit and to benefit from the predictive analysis.

It is easier for a supply chain personnel to point out the problem areas in the supply chain and how to improve them when they have access to monitoring tools.