How the Covid-19 pandemic has changed pharma logistics

Pharmanovia specializes in late-stage development, licensing and acquisition. The UK-based company’s Head of Supply Chain, Mohammad Samy, shares his tips for ensuring a highly efficient, sustainable supply chain.

There are five crucial steps to facilitating and maintaining maximum efficiency throughout the pharma industry: Prepare, plan, recover, respond and re-assess. The pandemic-induced restrictions forcibly introduced a new way of working with partners and customers to ensure operations and processes were able to continue.

Covid-19 led the pharma industry to experience severe, unprecedented delays in terms of transportation, therefore our strategy has evolved, allowing considerable time to be spent on both planning and preparation. Following the Covid-19 pandemic, it would be foolish for pharma organizations to not look ahead and ensure correct and robust processes are in place that can withstand uncertain or unexpected circumstances so business can continue as usual.

An additional factor presented by the pandemic has been to focus the industry response on prioritization, where particularly in-demand products are out of stock. Efficiently and continually reviewing where there is a particular backlog in the supply chain will ensure the most highly demanded products are pushed through as soon as possible.

Collaborative, sustainable working

Partnering with industry leaders is also conducive to flexibility, which was essential during the pandemic and will undoubtedly continue to be in the future.

We have also witnessed an increase in cross-sector collaboration and collective responsibility to reduce the carbon footprint across the pharma industry.

For example, there are means to significantly reduce the carbon footprint of long-haul shipments and to make high volume shipments over long distances more sustainable and economical. By balancing out or counteracting the increase in shipment time from air shipping to sea shipping, we can improve efficiency in other processes, such as approval and regulations.

By carrying out these processes earlier through the preparing and planning phases, by the time a ship has docked all the other boxes have been ticked to enable the products to go to market. Commercial shipments can arrive via freight and be released in the European Union concurrently, taking on a phased, efficient approach across all the markets we are active in.

Reducing time-to-market

Something we are being particularly innovative with here at Pharmanovia is implementing late-stage customization. The overall life cycle process can have up to four months’ lead time before the products are then shipped to their final destination, which can take another two to four weeks. To react to any changes in market demand, we must go back to the first stage of manufacturing and ensure we have sufficient stock ready which can then be customized and taken to market as quickly as possible.

This significantly reduces the timeline as the products can then be packaged and shipped ready to market promptly, while reducing any risk of write-offs. This is also referred to as ‘postponement supply chain risk’. By ensuring the risk is low, it is possible to efficiently react to changes in market demand.
Since the Covid-19 pandemic we have been onboarding two or three global logistics partners so that we have greater flexibility with tendering and greater access to transport networks across air, ship and road.

We also utilize local packaging hubs to ship products out as early as possible to relevant markets, which fundamentally improves patient access, as well as minimizing the risk of write-off. Having this greater flexibility puts us in a great competitive position.

Streamlining operations

The need for a regular review of strategies across our business has been exacerbated by the pandemic. While it may seem as though the pharmaceutical market is one which should have thrived during the pandemic, it is still a market which has suffered largely due to restrictions on transportation, capacity and storage issues following manufacture, due to the global Covid-19 vaccination rollouts.

Streamlining operations has been crucial in ensuring our relationships with our partners and stakeholders remain strong and conducive to achieving maximum efficiency. This is imperative to improving market access to pharmaceutical drugs globally.

Providing greater visualization of data through implementing and upscaling user-friendly monitoring across all business levels has been instrumental to increasing supply chain resilience. We have created a dashboard that enables monitoring and effective communication when managing our shipments across all the markets we are active in.

As long as we have taken ownership and carried out our operations correctly and efficiently, the business-to-business transactions within the final stage of the life cycle can then take place.

A constantly changing landscape

The way in which drugs need repurposing changes regularly, especially when considering medical breakthroughs, and we are currently witnessing an increase in openness in information sharing and industry collaboration to keep up with demand.

Price rises in oil, energy, labor costs due to Brexit and inflation, a shortage of manufacturing space due to Covid-19 vaccinations, as well as an increase in ESG regulations have all had a significant impact on the pharmaceutical industry.

The current geopolitical landscape has also meant that navigating the global supply chain has become increasingly difficult. In terms of reprofiling, the efficacy of a drug can end up diminished if the demand is too overwhelming for the market, therefore as demand rises, the speed of reprofiling must be ahead of this.

Furthermore, delays in shipping due to transportation restrictions play a huge role in supply chain issues, however the Brexit Freedoms Bill is something we expect will help counteract this and allow the supply chain to run more smoothly, particularly across UK-EU links.

Accurate sharing of information, forward-planning and preparation, late-stage customization and multi-model mapping of alternative methods are all vital to de-risk the entire supply chain.

By being proactive rather than reactive, we can be both more operationally efficient and cost efficient. This is also more cost efficient and operationally as well, proactive rather than reactive. Being innovative and ahead of the curve regarding upscaling of late-stage customization across our portfolio means we can bring products closer to markets quicker, improving global market access.

Quick links: 

• Digitizing your cold chain operations to improve patient outcomes
• Why digital transformation is essential in the pharmaceutical supply chain
• A guide to discovering and addressing vulnerabilities in the supply chain

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