The Agile Supply Chain Podcast

The best procurement teams focus on more than price alone when making purchasing decisions—because some things are more important than discounts. In this episode of The Agile Supply Chain Podcast, Nico Bac, a P&G veteran and the founder of consulting firm Digital Procurement Now, and Pierre Mitchell, Chief Research Officer and Managing Director of Azul Partners, discuss the latest thinking on strategic sourcing and procurement and supply chain information management.

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. 

Greater collaboration between pharma companies and their end-to-end supply chain partners can lead to improved patient outcomes, greater resiliency, as well as significant business opportunities. In this episode of The Agile Supply Chain Podcast, Greg Cathcart, founder and CEO of Excellis Health Solutions, explains that if we collaborate better, “we can do better.”

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.

What could your supply chain team accomplish through tighter collaboration with your company’s finance team? In this episode of The Agile Supply Chain Podcast, Bob Belshaw, Director of Business Development at Falcon Group, explains how this type of tight-knit collaboration can lead to benefits like greater supply chain responsiveness to changes in demand; more cost-effective and strategic inventory decisions; and greater agility when disruptions arise.

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.

Pharma companies are increasingly taking an end-to-end view of the supply chain so they can ultimately deliver the right patient outcomes. Data is a critical component that enables you to achieve this goal by enabling you to manage the product on its journey to the patient, according to Timur Kabadayı, Managing Director of Conval Group, an information technology consulting firm that specializes in the life sciences industry. In this episode of The Agile Supply Chain Podcast, Kabadayı explains how the right approach to data management can help pharma companies and supply chain teams improve product safety and quality.

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.

It takes more than enterprise resource planning systems and buzzword-friendly technologies like “artificial intelligence” and “machine learning” to create an agile supply chain, according to Klaus Imping, CEO of mSE Solutions, a global management consulting firm. While these enabling layers are important, you also need to focus on how to change processes and integrate roles and responsibilities into a faster-reacting model. In this episode of The Agile Supply Chain Podcast, Imping shares practical advice on how to achieve greater agility and outside-in patient-centricity in your supply chain organization.

• 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.

The best decision makers often seek to limit their own options for dealing with problematic situations that arise—and this same technique can go a long way toward helping you ensure greater supply chain agility and responsiveness, according to Harshad Kanvinde, Global Supply Chain Practice Leader at Slalom. In this episode of The Agile Supply Chain Podcast, Kanvinde shares several best practices designed to help you boost supply chain agility across your organization. He also shares his thoughts on the implications of The Agile Supply Chain Credo.

• 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.

Your supply chain organization can purchase the most cutting-edge tools and technologies, but if it fails to create a competency framework that also includes people, processes, data, and change management, those investments will likely prove ineffective, according to HFS Research's Phil Fersht and Saurabh Gupta. In this episode of The Agile Supply Chain Podcast, Gupta and Fersht discuss the implications of The Agile Supply Chain Credo and explain what their extensive research tells us about how to carry out a successful supply chain transformation.

• 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.

Supply chain consultant and analyst Bob Ferrari, Managing Director of The Ferrari Consulting and Research Group, provides actionable advice on how to make the transformation from a linear supply chain to a highly responsive and collaborative multi-enterprise network. He also shares his thoughts on the evolution of agility.

• 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.

What can the clinical trials supply chain teach us about getting products to patients on time and in full (OTIF)? A great deal, according to David Northrup, Head of Supply Chain at Theravance Biopharma. In this episode of The Agile Supply Chain Podcast, Northrup shares the important supply chain lessons he learned while working in the clinical trials supply chain, as well as some sage advice on how to increase patient-centricity and improve OTIF in your organization.

• 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. 

IDC’s Bob Parker and Simon Ellis share groundbreaking research on how ongoing supply chain disruptions caused by COVID-19 are impacting the pharmaceutical industry. They also offer expert tips on how to adopt a holistic view of the end-to-end supply chain, achieve greater agility, and boost supply chain resiliency.

• 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.