Covid-19 has created the perfect storm for the pharmaceutical industry’s already challenged supply chain network. The pandemic increased supply chain risk and exposed weak areas such as the lack of end-to-end visibility. This is an observation from Daniel Carchedi, senior director of business development and strategy, Microsoft Health and Life Sciences.
Carchedi moderates a panel discussion, “Digital ecosystems and how to be sustainable supply chains” about how technology 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.
The discussion also included:
- Diane Crisciunas, Senior Vice President, Pharmaceutical Supply Chain Technologies, GlaxoSmithKline
- Ann Marie O’Halloran, Managing Director, Supply Chain – Life Sciences, Accenture
- Mike Walker, author, “REWIRE! Using the Digital Ecosystem Handbook to reinvent your business
This panel was part of a larger Microsoft Healthcare Virtual Summit. In a series of interviews as part of the Microsoft Envision Healthcare Summit, attention was drawn to the myriad ways cloud computing technology is affecting various aspects of healthcare across providers, payers, medtech and pharmaceuticals.
To view the virtual summit, Press here.
Increasing collaboration between software and pharmaceutical companies creates greater transparency in the supply chain, which is essential for complex drug development processes. Greater transparency improves the ability of drug companies not only to identify fraudulent behavior and stop counterfeit drugs, but also to collect and analyze data in new and unique ways to bring partners together, O’Halloran noted.
“The control towers are how you bring together disparate data from the internal and external network,” O’Halloran said.
Krisciunas shared how GSK uses control tower technology to inform logistics decisions.
“You can have 10-15 [digital] supply chain management ecosystems. It’s not just one central ecosystem to rule them all, as happens with other sectors.”
The rapid scaling 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 equipped to meet the needs of the biopharmaceutical industry.
To learn more about how pharmaceutical companies are collaborating with cloud computing providers, follow this link.
photo: zorazhuang, Getty Images