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LOGISTICS & DISTRIBUTION
Author: Mahesh Veerina, president and CEO, ParkourSC
Innovations in Real Time Supply Chain Operations Can Solve Logistics and Distribution Challenges
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hocks to the global pharmaceutical supply chain are more frequent and have a bigger impact than ever before. Pandemic disruptions, labour shortages, logistics and distribution challenges, human error, operational inefficiencies, geopolitical crises and more have all conspired to create significant hurdles that have stymied supply chain operations for countless organisations.
For reasons we’ll explore, pharmaceutical supply chains are particularly hard hit. Fortunately, the right modernisation efforts can help ensure resilience and spur ongoing innovation in the face of these challenges. In this article, we examine how this is possible through solutions that bring improved levels of digitisation, visibility and control to pharmaceutical supply chain environments. STEEP SUPPLY CHAIN CHALLENGES IN PHARMA In the past few years, the pharmaceutical industry has faced highly visible challenges, particularly relating to the development and distribution of COVID-19 vaccines. The
numbers are significant and the instances many. On a global scale, the World Health Organisation estimates that up to 50% of vaccines are wasted every year. Extrapolated to the scale of COVID-19, this spoilage rate could waste a billion or more vaccine doses – a staggering waste of health care resources. The United States Center for Disease Control (CDC) reported that at least 15 million doses of the COVID-19 vaccine were wasted in just a 6 month period last year. That’s a conservative estimate that doesn’t even cover all places that handle, store and administer vaccines. And then there are cases where vaccines don’t pass quality inspection to
begin with – including a New York Times account of nearly 400 million doses scrapped by a manufacturer due to poor quality control. Much of this waste can be attributed to shortcomings in logistics to support an unbroken cold chain. Failures in the pharmaceutical cold chain alone cost the industry an estimated $35 billion (around £29 billion or €33.7 billion a year). That’s because temperature variations in transit, warehouse delays and other breakdowns that might constitute moderate inconveniences in a typical supply chain can have devastating impacts for pharmaceutical cold chains. A single anomaly can cause entire
