Covid-19 has created the perfect storm for a supply chain network that the pharmaceutical industry is already facing.Pandemic Increased supply chain risk and exposed weaknesses, such as a lack of end-to-end visibility.This is an observation from Daniel Carchedi, Senior Director, Business Development and Strategy, Health and Life Sciences at Microsoft.
Carchedi moderated a panel discussion,”Digital ecosystems and how to validate the future of supply chains” on how tech companies such as Microsoft and Accenture are working closely with the pharmaceutical industry as they seek to fix and improve manufacturing supply chain issues exposed by the Covid-19 pandemic.
Speakers in the discussion also included:
- Diane Krisciunas, Senior Vice President, Supply Chain Technology, GlaxoSmithKline
- Anne Marie O’Halloran, Managing Director, Life Sciences Supply Chain, Accenture
- Mike Walker, Author, “Rewire! Reinvent Your Business Using the Digital Ecosystem Playbook
The panel is part of a larger virtual healthcare summit hosted by Microsoft. In a series of interviews as part of the Microsoft Envision Healthcare Summit, the myriad ways in which cloud computing technology touches different aspects of healthcare, including providers, payers, medtech and pharmaceutical companies, were highlighted.
To view the virtual summit, Click here.
Increasing collaboration between software and pharmaceutical companies can increase transparency across the supply chain, which is critical for the complex drug development process. O’Halloran noted that greater transparency has improved pharma’s ability to not only identify fraud and stop counterfeit drugs, but also aggregate and analyze data in new and unique ways to unify partners.
“The control tower is How do you bring together disparate data from inside and outside the network,” O’Halloran said.
Krisciunas shares how GSK uses control tower technology to inform logistics decisions.
“You can have 10-15 [digital] ecosystem to manage the supply chain. It’s not just a central ecosystem to rule them like you do in other areas. “
The rapid expansion of sophisticated data aggregation tools by technology and pharmaceutical companies will help ensure that as drug development becomes more complex, the supply chain will be able to meet the needs of the biopharmaceutical industry.
To learn more about how pharma companies can work with cloud computing providers, follow this link.
photo: Zola Zhuang, Getty Images
