Pfizer has treated the complications of its supply chain with doses of
cloud computing, virtualization and other tools, enabling the drug giant to
track shipments from a large network of internal and external sources with
improved efficiency and accuracy, The Financial Times reports.
As the FT reports, Pfizer has
reconfigured its IT systems for managing its supply chain over the past year and a half in response to a variety of challenges. For
instance, the company's megamerger with Wyeth in 2009 brought its own integration challenges. More recently, the company's
top-selling cholesterol drug Lipitor faces pricing pressure because of new generic competition, forcing Pfizer
to adopt measures to supply the pill as efficiently as possible.
Supply-chain problems carry consequences for drugmakers and potentially
patients. Patients depend on the drugs ferried along supply chains to treat
serious conditions and drugmakers risk losing revenue when shipments fail to
arrive or other issues arise in their supply chains. In some cases, pharma
manufacturers adopt new software and infrastructure to manage their supply
chains with an eye toward eventual cost-savings as well as improved regulatory
compliance.
And supply-chain or logistics software that doesn't work right can cause
big problems. AstraZeneca has reduced its revenue projections for the
year 1% after software problems at a plant in Sweden backed up supplies
intended for emerging markets. Novartis
recently had to undertake a GMP investigation for the European Medicines Agency and the Agenzia Italiana del Farmaco in Italy after a "data-handling
discrepancy caused some vaccines to be temporarily and voluntarily held for
several months."
"After the Wyeth acquisition, we looked at the complexity of our
network and realized that we not only needed to manage the tapestry of internal
manufacturing and logistic sites, we also needed to manage and really
understand what's going on with our external trading partners," said Jim
Cafone, Pfizer's vice president of supply network services, as quoted by
the FT.
Pfizer opted to adopt a cloud-based supply-chain platform from GT Nexus as
part of an overall approach that allows everyone involved in the company's
supply chain to connect to the system regardless of each sites' own IT
infrastructure, according to the FT article. And rather than the
company's 500 partners having to adopt Pfizer's resource planning software, the
groups all use the same information exchange framework that lets them send and
receive data from Pfizer and vice versa.