The pharmaceutical industry relies on a robust supply chain wherein there’s no room for errors — precisely why it is time for the industry to embrace technological interventions to tackle its biggest challenges.
With changing times and more so with the onset of the pandemic, the traditional pharma industry has opened its arms to the latest technology to address challenges like visibility, traceability, and sustainability.
As the sector continues to transform and digital solutions start to take hold, it’s worth looking at some key developments that could be on the horizon for more efficient drug delivery.
The emergence of the circular supply chain is one such trend. Green supply chain and SCaaS, aka supply chain as a service, are other emerging trends that will also affect the pharma supply chain.
The pandemic forced the pharma industry to accelerate its adoption of new technologies and offer a new lease to the supply chain. Now, with the evolution of technology, pharma companies can focus on ways to secure responsiveness, visibility, and transparency in supply chain management.
In fact, according to a report by Deloitte, about 70% of pharma clients desired that intelligent technologies must influence the drug development process in 2022. Keeping this in mind, here are the top trends in the pharma supply chain that businesses need to keep an eye on:
End-to-end traceability allows targeted recalls and keeps the negative impact on the brand to a minimum. With traceability, pharma companies can also track fraudulent actions targeted at introducing counterfeit drugs and medicines into the market. This helps pharma companies identify fakes and take steps to thwart them and further assure the safety of their products.
As a matter of fact, the notion of traceability has gained even more relevance now that the Indian Government has taken steps to eliminate counterfeit medicines from the supply chain by mandating the use of QR codes on APIs (Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients), effective January 1, 2023.
“No one wants to be the one who packages the wrong thing and spoils 68 million vaccines,” said Dave Berry, Strategy Lead at Medicines Manufacturing Innovation Centre, at Pharma IQ’s event on pharmaceutical manufacturing automation. His statement quite literally sums up the issue at hand and how packaging automation can help resolve issues related to product mix-up, labelling, quality, time, and costly human errors.
Automation in packaging can reduce errors to a great level. And more profoundly, it can:
Analysts at McKinsey stress how pharma supply chain resilience must be “on the executive agenda” and “embedded in an organisation’s strategic planning.” While this holds valid for almost every industry looking to optimise supply chain operations, it bodes exceptionally well for pharmaceutical companies that must be vigilant in the face of a possible drug shortage, counterfeiting, or weather-related (if applicable) disruptions.
There’s also the case for developing a resilient supply chain. Resistance capacity and recovery are some factors that characterise resilient supply chains. Bottlenecks in the pharma supply chain are a given, and companies need to be proactive in managing potential problems. Structured governance drives the introduction of risk identification and risk management tools across the supply-chain network, making it resilient to external disruptions.
All these trends will aid in overcoming the challenges related to visibility, traceability, and sustainability.
Visibility in the supply chain still remains one of the biggest challenges for the pharma industry. Other challenges include practices of goods distribution, supplier compliance management, quality of suppliers, and data integrity.
The changes in regulatory policies, the mounting pressure of cost, and supplier compliance add to these challenges and inflict product recall risks. Favourably, these risks can be mitigated through effective traceability in the pharma supply chain system.
It is a given that pharma products are quality and time sensitive and require constant monitoring through their journey in the supply chain. The latest serialisation technologies that help with track and trace could bolster the pharma supply chain as products are shipped worldwide.
Altogether, technology-facilitated visibility in pharma supply chain management plays a significant role. With increased and improved visibility, pharma companies can ‘track’ their processes and aim for better supply chain management.
As mentioned above, there are numerous challenges that a pharmaceutical supply chain faces, and security is also one of them. In fact, it’s a prime concern.
Considering the ramifications of lack of security, the pharma industry with a not-so-secured supply chain may face the aforementioned issues like widespread counterfeit drugs, revenue loss, and even downtime. But this is not all; the industry can also lose consumers’ trust, and the danger to human life can’t be overruled as well.
Now is when pharma companies need to rethink their strategies for adhering to regulations and related compliances. These are there to help companies secure their supply chain for better tracking and visibility and help them remediate their security practices for better and on-time-in-full (OTIF) delivery.
At QodeNext, we can help your pharmaceutical business resolve all the aforementioned challenges via effective end-to-end traceability. Get in touch to know more.
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