What is the Role of Supplier Identification in the Pharma Industry?

As the world has entered a new decade, all industries are facing a tide of change due to evolving governments, changing consumer preferences, rising awareness, and the lasting impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. In the pharma industry, companies are struggling to keep pace with their rapidly evolving market due to the lack of efficient and collaborative partners. Supplier identification helps companies identify and partner with the ideal vendors and suppliers for their business, while enabling both parties to maintain growth, stay ahead of the industry, and develop differentiated offerings together. Having a robust, communicative, and mutually beneficial partnership can set companies apart from each other significantly and give rise to an unprecedented strategic advantage in a highly competitive market such as the pharmaceutical industry. Supplier identification is the process of carefully scrutinizing, evaluating, and identifying the best fit suppliers as per companies’ needs, targets, strategic goals, and offerings. Efficiently choosing a partner requires clear planning, comprehensive strategizing, awareness regarding expectations, and clearly defined goals. This process also helps companies leverage various sustainable, unparalleled, and advantageous benefits.

What are Key Benefits of Supplier Identification?

Strong Communication: An efficient supplier identification process requires companies to develop a comprehensive and data-driven understanding of their needs, expectations, and potential offerings when searching for or developing a partnership. This translates to improved transparency within the company, and with potential suppliers. Additionally, it encourages companies to identify and choose partners that can reciprocate the same level of communication and clarity, and build a strong communication network between both parties. Having a robust communicative network can help partners minimize costs, mitigate risks, support each other’s business targets, and develop offerings that are differentiated. This also leads to more sustainable partnerships, improved collaboration, and reduced chances of error. 

High Quality: As consumer awareness rises and preferences change significantly, companies must ensure that their offerings are of high quality. Low-quality products and services can lead to a substantial rise in customer attrition rates, loss of market share, and overall decline in profitability and success. The supplier identification process requires companies to establish the required quality of products and services to be procured, produced, and distributed to consumers, and enables choosing partners that can deliver as per the predetermined standard. If conducted efficiently, it also helps establish a quality benchmark from the beginning of the supply chain till the end-consumers, and helps them develop trust and loyalty towards the brand.

Strategic Fit: Partnerships can be challenging to develop and maintain, and companies often fail to identify suppliers and vendors that can meet their needs, help them achieve their targets, and maintain the required ethics or quality of work. However, during the supplier identification process, companies must gain a comprehensive understanding of their current processes, future plans, and overall business strategies. This enables choosing partners that have similar targets, want growth at a similar rate, and can help the company successfully implement all developed strategies. Additionally, this helps create a more congruent and equal relationship, and paves the path for a sustainable, long-term partnership that is beneficial for both parties.

Improved Innovation: As the pharma industry continues to grow, competition rises, and the needs of the world change significantly. The rising geriatric population, growing prevalence of chronic diseases, and jarring impact of the COVID 19 pandemic has led to a compelling need for constant innovation. Having a well-chosen and strategically supportive partner can help companies improve their innovation process, gain more inputs, and develop well-informed products or services. Product development is a challenging process, particularly in the pharmaceutical industry, and having insight from the suppliers’ market, current inputs regarding technological advancements, and updates into industry developments can help create offerings that are a step ahead of competitors. Supplier identification helps companies find partners that can meet all expectations, and enable sustainable growth through joined product development and collaborative work.

Increased Efficiency: The complex and fragmented nature of the pharmaceutical value chain requires companies to constantly improve upon their supply chains, develop better strategies, and ensure efficiency at every step. Having the right suppliers and vendors significantly propels that process and helps companies maintain efficiency from the beginning of the chain. Additionally, during the supplier identification process, companies must assess the internal quality of work, level of transparency, and overall efficiency of the suppliers’ operations, enabling them to make a well-informed, data-driven decision and choose a partner that can improve their efficiency. With improved efficiency, pharma companies can gain a significant strategic edge, establish themselves as pioneers in new markets, and overcome the challenges introduced by the rapidly paced market.

Success Story

The constant changes, evolutions, and developments of the pharma industry can lead to various challenges for companies in the market, and give rise to a multitude of complexities along the supply chain. Having the right partner can significantly alter those challenges and help companies achieve their potential through collaborative, efficient, and communicative work. A growing pharmaceutical manufacturer was unable to keep pace with the sudden surge in demand, and repeatedly faced complications within its supply chain due to a lack of cooperation and communication with the vendors. To tackle this issue and develop a sustainable solution, the company chose to partner with SpendEdge. Our experts closely scrutinized the shortcomings in the pharma company’s supplier selection process and provided them with an improved supplier identification process. After re-negotiation and the development of new partnerships, the company witnessed significant changes in their overall performance, improved supply chain efficiency, regained market share, and established themselves as a key competitor and industry leader in their geographic region.