Centralizing Supply Chain under One-Roof Brings Wide Range of Benefits

Most pharmaceutical companies have complex, underused and inefficient supply chains. Worse yet, they are ill-equipped to handle the kind of products that come down the pipeline. By 2020, many of the medicines produced by the industry will be specialist therapies that will require completely different techniques of manufacturing and distribution from those used to produce small molecules. In short, a radical overhaul is needed for the pharmaceutical supply chain. The question here is why pharmaceutical supply chains are being shortened and how can stakeholders work together to improve efficiency in pharmaceutical and medical device design, manufacturing and distribution?

Worldwide, various stress factors are facing the pharmaceutical industry, that are becoming more intense in most cases. It is necessary to look at the key developments influencing the market of tomorrow and consider their collective influence in order to overcome the roadblocks today. One key driver of shift is that with the rise of biological and genomic medicine, product life cycles are becoming shorter. As a consequence, the market is changing from traditional small molecule and solid-dose products to larger bio-engineered, complex and technical products. This leads to increased pressure on supply chains to offer sensitive medicines within tighter periods of time.

Manufacturers of pharmaceutical products need to invest in and incorporate truly global networks of production and distribution.