Overview of the Pharmaceutical Industry

The global pharmaceutical industry is typically responsible for the development, production, and marketing of medications. With growing concerns pertaining to healthcare treatments, the pharmaceutical industry has witnessed a promising growth across the globe. The industry is also expected to witness a considerable growth, owing to the changing lifestyles, aging population, and unhealthy eating habits. Moreover, the positive global influence of drugs on health, prosperity, and economic productivity is compelling pharmaceutical industry manufacturers to invest highly in R&D to revolutionize the treatment process.

However, a few factors are influencing the growth prospects of the industry. A few factors include:

• Rising customer expectations: Today, pharmaceutical industry players need to ensure that new therapies are clinically and economic better than their alternatives. This is because the commercial environment is getting harsher with customers looking for cost constraints in the products and services offered. Moreover, the increasing incidence of illness across the globe is forcing players to deliver promising solutions with the utmost quality.
• Policy reforms: With healthcare being the top priority of the governments across the globe, leading organizations are facing intense pressures to meet the adequate quality concerns pertaining to the products and services offered to the patients. As a result, becomes important for pharmaceutical players to ensure that they meet the regulations set forth by the governments.

Many such factors are compelling pharmaceutical industry companies to leverage the use of robust supply chain management solutions.

The Business Challenge and Journey

The client, a leading pharmaceutical industry player, specializing in a variety of innovative medicines that help treat serious diseases like diabetes mellitus, cardiovascular disease, inflammatory disorders, rheumatoid arthritis, and psychiatric disorders utilized a localized transactional process, which ultimately led to regional inconsistencies and inefficiencies. Their Purchase Requisition (PR) to Purchase Order (PO) process was lengthy and inefficient in achieving the desired turnaround time. Additionally, the client lacked visibility and the ability to measure their metrics, which prevented them from attaining global standardization.

To help the client create a centralized procurement operations center to support transactional procurement activities, the supply chain management experts at SpendEdge developed a robust market research approach. The analysis included primary and secondary research coupled with qualitative and quantitative data collection methodology.

During the course of this engagement, the pharmaceutical industry client created a centralized procurement operations center to support transactional procurement activities. The centralized center included performing change order management, generating and transmitting POs, and maintaining a functional helpdesk.  Additionally, the client developed a report and analytics support center to create proof of concept scorecards while conducting new report development. This helped them improve compliance.

Key questions answered in this supply chain management engagement

The Results

The supply chain management engagement helped the client decrease their average PO issuance time to .15 days from 1+ days. Also, the client increased production volume to 120K transactions per year, reduced invoice cycle time, and improved PO by 35%.

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