Key Takeaways

• The best suppliers want to work with pharma companies who embrace digital tools and techniques that can make them even better.
• When you are doing strategic sourcing and bringing on new suppliers, you are effectively doing extended network design. Therefore, it’s important to think carefully about what kind of network you are creating. 

Key Takeaways

• Insurance companies are increasingly requesting supply chain and dispenser-level business improvements designed to ensure the safety and authenticity of medicines given to their insured patients.
• The “walls” that have traditionally prevented closer collaboration between end-to-end supply chain partners are slowly beginning to come down.

Key Takeaways

• If your view of the finance department’s function and capabilities is too rigid, you may be limiting options that can increase your agility in the face of supply chain disruptions.
• Best-in-class companies set up cross-functional teams that include the CFO, finance team members, and supply chain and procurement team members. The goal is to work together to weigh the ramifications of business decisions and boost supply chain efficiency and resilience.
• Finance leaders may need to set new types of goals that support the need for supply chain responsiveness.

Key Takeaways

• The most important aspect of The Agile Supply Chain Credo is its focus on patient safety and meeting patient demand right time, first time, every time.
• Companies across the end-to-end pharma supply chain produce and deliver medicines—but they also create data that can be shared to improve demand forecasts and boost supply chain agility.
• The global pharma industry could potentially save billions of dollars through digital supply chain enhancements—money which could then be reinvested in research and development.

Key Takeaways

• It’s important to avoid the trap believing that having an agile supply chain means having freedom to do anything and everything. Agility requires a great deal of structure in the form of stable and standardized processes.
• Patient-centricity starts with thinking in a demand-driven manner.
• Many companies believe that if they simply standardize their ERP, they have checked the box for agility. But the process of creating a truly agile and patient-centric supply chain is far more complex and requires sophisticated decision support.

Key Takeaways

• Supply chain agility is about building an integrative capability across people, processes, technology, and leadership that enables you to quickly sense and analyze potential disruption and variations from plans.
• It’s important to approach supply chain agility dynamically across every part of your organization because different products, segments, and business units have response expectations that vary.
• The most effective supply chain leaders codify best practices, create limited-flexibility options for different situations, and understand their processes extremely well. This enables them to make quick decisions and rapidly identify the root causes of problems that arise.

Key Takeaways

• One of the key principles of The Agile Supply Chain Credo is patient-centricity, and that’s all about moving away from using inventory as an insurance policy and focusing on patients’ needs and dispenser-level data to get an accurate picture of demand.
• Some of the biggest challenges facing life sciences companies today include ensuring global supply chain visibility, increasing speed to market, and adapting to new ways of working in the age of COVID-19.
• To be a successful supply chain leader in the COVID-19 era and beyond, you must embrace digital transformation and become a true proponent of change. You need to be someone who is willing to move fast and get things done.

Key Takeaways

• Supply chain professionals need to stop thinking in terms of rigid, linear supply chains and instead focus on the idea of highly coordinated, collaborative, and agile multi-enterprise response networks.
• A growing number of industries are embracing outside-in, demand-driven supply chain strategies, which originated in the consumer goods and high-tech sectors.
• Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems once served as the technology cornerstone for achieving agility. But the idea of “agility” has come to encompass much more than just technology—it also depends on people, processes, and leadership.

Key Takeaways

• The clinical trials supply chain has always been highly focused on the patient; therefore, it can serve as a model for patient-centricity in the commercial pharmaceutical supply chain.
• Building closer relationships with downstream partners can help you gain a better understanding of the drivers behind patient demand.
• Looking beyond the walls of the supply chain team and sharing data with other areas of the business can help you significantly improve demand forecast accuracy. 

Key Takeaways

• Gaining end-to-end supply chain visibility alone is not enough. You also need the ability to rapidly intervene and adapt to new conditions when supply chain disruptions are spotted.
• Pharma supply chain companies should consider creating a decision environment that serves as a “process twin,” enabling them to quickly identify root causes and rectify adverse events in the supply chain.
• Companies should stop deploying local or siloed solutions to fix problems. It’s time to do away with the “metaphorical Band-aids” and start thinking holistically about how to achieve supply chain resiliency.
• The Agile-Supply Chain Credo is a set of guiding principles for transforming your supply chain and achieving real patient-centricity.

Key Takeaways

• Over 80% of pharma company executives believe COVID-19 is prompting a fundamental shift toward making patient-driven supply chains a reality—and one of their top concerns is “the need for speed.”
• Analyzing demand from multiple points of view, rapidly identifying the implications of changes in patient demand, dynamic monitoring of demand forecasts, and advanced statistical forecasting are all becoming table stakes as pharma companies seek to build more agile, responsive, and resilient supply chains.
• Companies that invested in agile supply chain capabilities before the COVID-19 pandemic erupted have been better positioned to react, respond, and recover compared to companies that did not.

Key Takeaways

• The 5 Stages of Supply Chain Transformation is a model for supply chain maturity developed by Roddy Martin and AMR Research about ten years ago. 
• Most pharma companies remain at stage one—the reactive stage—in the journey to supply chain transformation. 
• The most difficult part of the journey to transformation is transitioning from an ERP-centric view to an end-to-end view of supply chain processes.

Key Takeaways

• The pharma supply chain is getting more complex and, as a result, it now takes more than enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems to deliver the supply chain capabilities patients require. 
• It’s important to build agility into your strategic thinking and to create a roadmap for incorporating new technologies into your supply chain operations. 
• A good first step toward achieving agility is developing the ability to rapidly sense and respond to supply chain disruptions. 

Key Takeaways

• Many companies standardize and digitalize core business processes, but you can also benefit from codifying the business improvement journey itself. 
• One road to continuous improvement begins with a focus on the errors made in business processes. 
• You shouldn’t wait until the end of a business process to catch errors—it’s important to detect and correct errors as business processes are running.

Key Takeaways

• Many supply chain executives say end-to-end visibility is the number one requirement for a smart and responsive supply chain. 
• To become more agile, you first need to bring your organization’s division leaders together and get them adopt a cross-silo mentality. 
• You can use technology that exists today to augment legacy systems and create an agile, responsive, and intelligent supply chain.

Key Takeaways

• The Agile Supply Chain Credo is a new approach to the life sciences supply chain that places a greater emphasis on people and their ability to achieve the ultimate objective: serving patients. 
• One of the key principles of The Agile Supply Chain Credo is a commitment to delivering safe products and medicines on time and in full to customers and patients. 
• Another key principle is a commitment to exercising resiliency and ongoing responsiveness to patient and customer demand.

Key Takeaways

• A one-size-fits-all approach to supply chain fails to account for different buying behaviors and different expectations. 
• Four or five dominant behavioral segments normally account for 80% of a given market, which can help companies plan their outside-in strategy. 
• Demand-driven segmentation is fundamental to understanding the critical criteria you need to deliver medicine to patients on time, in full, especially for specialty products. 

Key Takeaways

• Products aren’t necessarily the differentiator in a competitive marketplace, but the manner in which you deliver that product can be. 
• Customer-driven logistics hinge on understanding the specific needs and behaviors of the customer, and a one-size-fits-all approach is no longer viable. 
• Data is the bloodstream of your supply chain, and the health of that data is fundamental to achieving agility, resilience, and reliability.

Key Takeaways

• Supply chain management needs to evolve to incorporate a risk management mindset. 
• Resilience in a post-pandemic landscape is about absorbing and being energized by disruptions. 
• Truly great supply chain companies don't just sense demand, they translate it. 

Key Takeaways

• Despite a high burden of disease, limited supply, and a complex financial model, emerging markets are often early adopters of supply chain technology.
• Lessons learned from Ebola have provided a framework for COVID-19 response in African markets, including restricting travel and contact-tracing capabilities, but challenges persist.
• Emerging markets are making progress toward patient-centric models, but in many cases have different drivers than in industrialized markets.

Key Takeaways

• To achieve patient centricity, both industrialized and frontier markets must change their top-down models.
• While logistics are often the focus, money and information flow are often the biggest challenges for frontier markets.
• Industrialized markets can learn from entrepreneurs in frontier markets who are solving supply chain challenges with very strict resource constraints.

Key Takeaways

• Many companies have yet to make the transition to real-time, responsive, agile systems.
• Companies must identify core critical business capabilities, risks, and failure points.
• Focus first on a good definition of the problem you want to solve and the business outcome you want to achieve. 

Key Takeaways

• The industrial revolution is over and the digital age of supply chain has arrived. 
• Making the switch from the industrial age to the digital age requires a complete re-engineering of supply chain processes. 
• Sensors and other IoT technologies can help you predict problems before they happen, and that results in financial savings. 

Key Takeaways

• To achieve resilience, you first need a predictable foundation and a clear understanding of variables you cannot control.  
• To plan the future, you need to fully understand your current capabilities, and ensure that you can reliably deliver against that capability.
• The age‑old axiom, "people, process, technology," is as relevant as ever when it comes to achieving agility and resilience.

Key Takeaways

• COVID-19 has prompted a rethink of supply chain sourcing strategies. 
• To achieve supply chain agility, you must first achieve resilience. 
• The mental model of the supply chain is shifting to "patient-back," and that has major implications if you're striving for agility.

Key Takeaways

• One important aspect of agility is the responding quickly to new signals in your environment. Another is having enough foresight to anticipate changes.
• Systems, processes, and teams should be designed with agility in mind.
• It’s time to revisit supply chain mental models and re-conceptualize the enterprise.

Key Takeaways

• It’s important to make sure your supply chain planning strategy is tightly linked to the company’s larger competitive strategy within the industry.
• By forging close ties with marketing and commercial teams, supply chain leaders can respond to innovations from competitors with greater speed and agility.
• Avoid the mistake of viewing sales and operations planning (S&OP) as a supply chain process. It should be seen as a business process. 

Key Takeaways

• Supply chain has moved from a concept to a discipline, bringing more science and process to the industry.
• Over the last three years, about 50% of new drugs have been launched through CDMOs, underscoring their importance to the industry. 
• For CDMOs, quality is the number one consideration, followed by innovation and investments.

Key Takeaways

• The first step to transforming your end-to-end supply chain is understanding where the defects are today. 
• The next steps include embracing digital technologies, retraining staff, and implementing predictive analytics. 
• Today's supply chain leaders are tasked with reinventing business models every 2-3 years. 

Key Takeaways

• COVID-19 revealed a lack of flexibility in the healthcare supply chain, but digital technologies are poised to help the industry increase agility.
• Digital will help to “eliminate friction” between supply chain stakeholders so they can quickly and seamlessly create new partnerships and business processes.