Retail supply chains and pharmaceutical supply chains have a lot in common. The main similarity is consumers buy from retailers, not from distributors or the manufacturers themselves, and the rate of consumption, plus the methods of acquiring the goods, are almost the same.
While there are more dire consequences when stock outs happen to pharmaceutical retailers, there are particular challenges in supply chain management that have to be managed effectively by the pharmaceutical side.
The Supply Chain Challenges
The first challenge is inventory tracking up to specifics like granularity.
Regulatory oversight affects the pharmaceutical industry drastically in almost all respects, and the Drug Supply Chain Oversight is one of the laws that has major consequences for supply chain tracking for manufacturers.
Pharmaceutical companies need to be able to track the flow of medication from where they were purchased, all the way down to the final consumers.
Demand and Delivery
The second challenge is to synchronize production with demand. Pharmaceutical companies will only be able to do this if they use deeply data-driven processes, but the problem is that they can only do this if retailers are able to share market signals with them, and this doesn’t always happen.
One of the solutions that is currently going through testing is the Available to Promise (ATP) software that is being installed in different pharmaceutical clients.
What ATP does is it calculates the lead time for delivery of on-hand stock and the possible delivery time of pharmaceuticals that are to be manufactured based on demand.