Beyond visibility: Innovations in real time supply chain operations

Mahesh Veerina, president and CEO - ParkourSC, describe solutions that could bring improved levels of digitisation, visibility and control to pharmaceutical supply chain environments.

Shocks to the global pharmaceutical supply chain are more frequent and have a bigger impact than ever before. Pandemic disruptions, labour shortages, logistics and distribution challenges, human error, operational inefficiencies, geopolitical crises and more have all conspired to create significant hurdles that have stymied supply chain operations for countless organisations.

For reasons we’ll explore, pharmaceutical supply chains are particularly hard hit. Fortunately, the right modernisation efforts can help ensure resilience and spur ongoing innovation in the face of these challenges.

Steep supply chain challenges in pharma

In the past few years, the pharmaceutical industry has faced highly visible challenges, particularly relating to the development and distribution of COVID-19 vaccines. The numbers are significant and the instances many. On a global scale, the World Health Organisation estimates that up to 50% of vaccines are wasted every year. Extrapolated to the scale of COVID-19, this spoilage rate could waste a billion or more vaccine doses – a staggering waste of health care resources.  

The United States Center for Disease Control (CDC) reported that at least 15 million doses of the COVID-19 vaccine were wasted in just a 6 month period last year. That’s a conservative estimate that doesn’t even cover all places that handle, store and administer vaccines. And then there are cases where vaccines don’t pass quality inspection to begin with – including a New York Times account of nearly 400 million doses scrapped by a manufacturer due to poor quality control.

Much of this waste can be attributed to shortcomings in logistics to support an unbroken cold chain. Failures in the pharmaceutical cold chain alone cost the industry an estimated $35 billion (around £29 billion or €33.7 billion a year). That’s because temperature variations in transit, warehouse delays and other breakdowns that might constitute moderate inconveniences in a typical supply chain can have devastating impacts for pharmaceutical cold chains. A single anomaly can cause entire batches of product to be ruined, contributing to the statistics cited above.

Whether it’s environmental conditions, tight product expiration windows or any of the more common pain points all industries endure in their supply chains, the central challenge is visibility and the ability to take real-time action to correct excursions. Many pharma companies struggle with a lack of visibility across the full supply chain journey of drugs and therapeutics, from development to patient, and every step in between. This lack of visibility manifests in poor planning, inaccurate predictions and delayed decision-making – all of which increases risk, leads to waste, and erodes value for the organisation.

The power of digital twins

Across the whole supply chain logistics ecosystem of customers, suppliers and transportation modalities, what’s needed are new technologies for supply chain visibility and control. One particularly powerful approach for mitigating losses and positioning the organisation not just for resilience, but for ongoing innovation, is to implement digital twin technology.

A digital twin is a virtual representation of the entire supply chain ecosystem – a virtual map of assets across operations and business processes that’s built from vast amounts of accessible, real-time, ground truth data flowing across connected systems. By digitising and monitoring the end-to-end supply chain, the resulting digital thread of connected data allows supply chain constituents to model and optimise operations.

Digital twins enable the generation and sharing of deep data intelligence drawn from numerous sources across every supply chain constituent. The modelling happens virtually, so digital twins can be safely and economically deployed to enable real-time supply chain operations. The enhancements in visibility, control and decision support help pharmaceutical manufacturers meaningfully tackle new and legacy challenges – and actively course correct using a “real-time, all the time” approach to bridge the gap between plan and execution. Supply chain executives can model and run simulations and what-if scenarios for failure planning, disruptions and supply-demand fluctuations.

When implemented across the extended network of suppliers, production, transportation and other partners in the extended value chain, digital twin can optimise operations and accelerate value through live, real-time collaboration portals – convening stakeholders across the enterprise in a collective effort to safeguard quality and ensure compliance in drug substance and drug product integrity and security.

Orchestrating data and assets to reap maximum value

Critical to the success of digital twin capabilities are the standards and processes around the data that make up the digital thread – the orchestration of data that shapes how the digital twin modelling process itself will work.

A key categorical distinction to make here is between tracking so-called “hard attributes” and “soft attributes” in the supply chain.  Whereas tracking hard attributes involves visibility into the location and condition of goods and supplies in real time as they move through the supply chain, tracking soft attributes accounts for the business processes and workflows that apply throughout this journey.

When pharmaceutical enterprises pursue visibility through tracking both hard and soft attributes together, they can achieve more granular visibility into business processes and are quicker at flagging any exceptions or organisational bottlenecks. They also have more robust data sets to fuel more proactive, and even predictive, digital twin modelling scenarios.

Each form of tracking is unique: Hard attribute-based tracking uses IoT sensors and contextual systems to capture and interpret the ground truth on raw materials, components and finished goods in real time. This gives visibility into delays or temperature excursions in transit, or whether a component at rest is damaged at the factory or warehouse. Soft attribute tracking, meanwhile, focuses on events from workflows involving orders, shipments, documentation like trade clearance, quality and compliance, customs etc. and whether this paperwork and processes are running smoothly – flagging any discrepancies in pricing, delivery schedules, contract terms or related processes.

Taken together, the combination of hard and soft attribute tracking drives digital twins toward a fuller picture of supply chain health – one that enables faster identification and resolution of problems. Data from incidents are fed into deep machine learning and reasoning algorithms to support real-time decision-making and even predictive analysis and issues resolution.

Conclusion

Powered by strong digital threads and optimal data standards and asset management, digital twin solutions can enable unprecedented visibility and intelligence into minute-by-minute adjustments for continuous supply chain optimisation in life sciences. And thanks to low-code/no-code scripts, AI and machine learning algorithms, and collaboration technologies, digital twins can be shared securely across partner networks to enable predictive intelligence and automated workflows across the entire supply chain.

Ultimately, robust digital twin implementations can help life sciences companies monitor changing conditions and incorporate ground truth to optimise operations across the ecosystem – from initial sourcing to the last mile delivery.  While this specialised industry may have especially steep supply chain challenges, those in charge of keeping production moving and profitable can take heart in the increasing power of technologies such as digital twins.