Pharma Use Case
Pharma Industry Supply Chain Success Story
Supply chain management in pharmaceutical companies can be challenging. For most of the companies it is not easy to have a flexible, cost-efficient, and a robust supply chain. The pharmaceutical supply chain involves a wide variety of stakeholders, including wholesalers, hospitals, pharmacies etc. The main goal is to prevent any possible damage to the company credibility and customer loyalty. To ensure this, in-market visibility of the customer activities should be;
- Analyzable
- Transparent
- And adaptable to organization needs.
And it should prevent problems such as over-stock and stock-out. Over-stock problems can cause fraudulent activities which can directly disturb patient health and can create a disruptive effect on public health. Stock-out problems on the other hand directly affect patients` health too. Overall, planning of delivery of goods should be precise to prevent these problems. And to have this precise planning, pharma companies need to have end-to-end traceability of their partners. It is essential to get full visibility of inventory downstream and enforce good shipping practices. This will ensure the prevention of above mentioned problems and transparency will increase the trust among partners and stakeholders.
One of the largest global pharmaceutical companies chose Ereteam, to create a comprehensive “In-market Inventory Planning” platform. In which, inventory and sales data from the customers are collected via emails or electronic data interfaces. They are then transformed into a single format based on our client`s master data standards and used for actions to improve inventory management.
Collection part of the solution entails; getting inventory and sales data from our client`s customers in wide variety of formats in terms of both ways of data sharing and data format types. These collected multiple formats of data from multiple organizations are then transformed into a standard format. As a result; consolidated sales – inventory data and product-organization-customer master data is presented for both analysis and planning. Based on this, the users in our client`s organization and their customers define together the minimum and maximum stock targets for each product that the customers should keep in their inventory. Purchase Order proposals based on min./max. safety stock targets are created and presented for adjustments/approvals. And automated alerts based on expiry dates and other parameters are created.
The solution is a great fit for our client`s ¨customer centric E2E supply chain¨ goals. And some of the benefits are provided by this solution are;
- Reduced working capital
- Increased reputation
- Higher service levels
- New partnerships
- Better insights
- And lower expenses
Better understanding of customer behavior and demand patterns improved the sales forecasts, which helped our client to take pro-active actions to avoid stock-outs. And enabled them to offer tailor-made solutions for their customers. With the better visibility of the inventory in market, the inventory at affiliate warehouse`s decreased which led to a saving in the working capital. Return products from the customers which are close-to their expiration date are allocated to other customers which reduced write-offs. Also, the customer’s service level is improved by comparing customer’s sales in a certain region with the number of patients in that region and helped the customer to be ready for potential changes in the demand. Allocation of constrained products between customer is now being done in a more data-driven way. The administrative burden of supply planning is lifted from the customers` shoulders