Between the sudden increase in demand, the massive shortage of products and the logistical setbacks encountered, the health crisis has highlighted a number of weaknesses in the pharmaceutical sector’s supply chain . To remain resilient, agile and competitive, industry players must now find solutions to optimize the entire supply chain.
Why optimize the supply chain in the pharmaceutical industry?
The pharmaceutical industry is an industry with a number of specific requirements and challenges that make supply chain management particularly complex.
The highly competitive sector is also governed by very strict legislation, with standards and controls (traceability, packaging, etc.) throughout the manufacturing and supply chain. In addition, there is an increase in production costs and often a decrease in the selling prices of medicines following government requests.
These specificities make the transport and logistics chain of the pharmaceutical industry very long and complex.
In addition, during the health crisis, the industry had to deal with a sudden explosion in demand of medicines in pharmacies, vaccines and other pharmaceutical goods, which was inevitably accompanied by a massive shortage of warehouse stocks. In addition, there were major logistical challenges, with supply and export difficulties.
This situation, although exceptional, has revealed a number of flaws in the pharmaceutical supply chain. The Covid-19 crisis has highlighted the need to optimize the current system to move towards a more resilient model, in order to accelerate the time to market of products, improve inventory management, and allow the optimization of the entire value chain.
How to optimize the supply chain in the pharmaceutical industry?
To optimize the supply chain model in the pharmaceutical field, industry players must inevitably activate a digital transformation.
Here are some examples of strategic actions to optimize the supply chain in the pharmaceutical industry :
- Improve the collection and use of data throughout the value chain (research, planning, order preparation, etc.) to facilitate decision-making and better manage the supply chain;
- Integrate artificial intelligence (AI) into supply chain workflows to facilitate data mining and automate processes;
- Diversify service providers (carriers and suppliers) geographically in order to decentralize risks in the event of a crisis or external hazards;
- Automate processes with connected tools;
- Placing innovation at the heart of the supply chain and detaching yourself from obsolete methods and processes.
This modernization of the pharmaceutical supply chain can help improve processes and identify risks and malfunctions upstream. But it can also make it possible to speed up the time to market of products, to strengthen quality standards, to have an overview of supply networks, to decompartmentalize information, to optimize flows and to better manage risks.
→ Read also : Supply chain management: limits of the global model in the face of the Covid crisis
