Life Sciences Supply Chain
Being There When Customers Need You Most While Also Tending to Your Own Health
Life science supply chains have a unique vantage point. Complex global supply chains with tight quality requirements on raw materials and active ingredients; and high customer service level requirements could make inventory planning very difficult. But high operating margins can support a “better safe than sorry” approach to inventory planning: many companies knowingly overstock beyond reason as excessive turns rarely fall below the long shelf life of stable components and products. On top of operational requirements, many add “strategic” inventory in case of supplier failures or natural disasters but can’t articulate what is driving the requirements.
No more. Investors and analysts increasingly demanded life science supply chains learn from their chemical and consumer products cousins in both manufacturing and distribution. There are significant pressures to reduce working capital without disrupting high service levels – but significant constraints as well. Supply variability is high, as quality requirements can force rejection of entire shipments or take a critical supplier off-line as they re-qualify. Certification of production is based off of fixed batch sizes which cannot be altered. Biologics often have non-deterministic time variability for growth. Tolling takes parts of the manufacturing chain out of immediate control. And distribution is SKU-intensive, with production wheels and batch sizes for a myriad of packaging and labeling requirements.
With so much depending on your products being in the right place at the right time — all the time — your brand can’t afford supply chain complications. But how will you take all these factors into consideration for inventory planning?
Bringing New Life to Inventory Planning
Managing complexity and uncertainty, for your brand — and your customers — has never been easier. At SmartOps, we’ve worked with life science businesses like yours to transform static, manual inventory planning into a rich, flexible, automated and scalable process, populated with complex data from all phases of your supply chain. That makes your inventory planning decisions straightforward and fact-based.
It all starts with SmartOps Enterprise Inventory Optimization (EIO). This unique enterprise solution is designed to help you:
- Manage Global Supply Chains Easily. Global life sciences companies typically have multiple supply chains that span different markets. This can make it difficult for you to see the big picture of your inventory, or to optimize the “total chain” on a regular basis.
SmartOps scalable enterprise platform simultaneously coordinates plans across all nodes — from active and inactive ingredients, through primary manufacturing, secondary manufacturing, packaging, warehousing, and market inventory-planning-distribution-retail. - Manage Inventory and Reduce Risk with Customer Service. The life science industry doesn’t tolerate much risk when it comes to service levels. But throwing more inventory at your supply chain doesn’t guarantee your product availability targets are met.
With SmartOps EIO you can manage the variability of supplier lead times, forecasts, and production capacities, decide where to put inventory and when and how much. The solution has allowed customers to improve fill rates and on-time delivery by an average of 5-10%. - Make Informed Inventory Decisions Based on Accurate Data. Manufacturing capacity for your life sciences products is expensive. This means your excess inventory has often been the buffer against any supply chain uncertainties and sudden periods of high demand.
SmartOps EIO looks at all of the reasons inventory is needed in the supply chain — whether it’s safety stock, cycle stock, pre-build stock, and in-transit inventories. Using the SmartOps system, you can determine reliable, optimal inventory targets, based on capacity limitations at any planning period, decide when to start building up inventory, by how much, and when — all with unprecedented accuracy. - Create Plans You Can Trust in the Face of Demand Uncertainty. In a perfect world, demand would always be consistent and strong. But in the real world, product demand over time is filled with uncertainties, variations and supply chain disruptions. How can you decide with confidence how much inventory to carry at any point in your supply chain? How can you manage safety stock and other inventory levels, and account for the triggers that drive customers’ changing needs?
SmartOps optimization algorithms manage uncertainties in the data. Our system offers you new visibility into the causes inventory of safety and other stock have — and it’s all accounted for down to the item, location, and time period level.
SmartOps Enterprise Inventory Optimization (EIO) fills a persistent gap in the supply chain planning landscape for Life Science companies. It generates improved inventory targets into existing business processes:
- Across all products and SKUs
- For all locations in the global supply chain
- For each planning period
- With consideration for all types of inventory (safety stock, cycle stock, in- transit/ pipeline stock, merchandising/ dealer stock)
