### Overcoming Challenges in Pharmaceutical Supply Chains: Harnessing New Technologies for Multi-Tier Visibility and Collaboration

Pharmaceutical supply chains are under immense pressure from multiple fronts. They face significant challenges including low OTIF fulfillment rates (30-40%), prolonged inventory hold-ups (150-180 days), and extended supply lead times (90-120 days). These issues complicate material availability, exacerbated by shifting disease areas, new product introductions, and frequent mergers and acquisitions. Ensuring supply chain continuity is critical for successful product launches, necessitating the design of new supply chains and networks.

The pharmaceutical sector heavily relies on outsourcing, resulting in complex multi-party relationships. Contract design and manufacturing organizations (CDMOs) control 61% of the manufacturing. Recent research by WBR highlighted that 64% of respondents cited upstream multi-tier visibility as their biggest challenge, hindering pharma brands from optimizing end-to-end outcomes.

### The Visibility Challenge in Pharmaceutical Supply Chains

Achieving upstream visibility in pharmaceutical supply chains is fraught with difficulties. Several factors contribute to this challenge:

1. **Low Digital Maturity**: Many nodes use hub-and-spoke solutions, limiting visibility beyond the first tier.

2. **Basic Collaboration**: Interaction with contract manufacturers (CMOs) is often minimal, and collaboration with second-tier suppliers is nearly non-existent.

3. **Data Sharing Difficulties**: CMOs manage capacities for multiple customers and often face non-compete clauses, complicating data sharing.

4. **Increasing Complexity**: Multi-tier production processes require access to granular, real-time batch production and quality data.

The root cause is the lack of fundamental prerequisites for obtaining real-time, multi-tier upstream visibility, namely:

- **Single Version of Truth**: A unified data model across the pharma brand's upstream supply chain, including CDMOs, intermediate suppliers, packagers, and API vendors, is essential.

- **Real-Time Orchestration and Intelligence**: A common layer of orchestration that integrates real-time data from internal and external sources is needed, paired with a robust data-sharing framework to ensure each party interacts with relevant visibility and output.

### The Network of Networks Solution

A federated network of networks model offers a solution, adhering to strict data privacy rules such as HIPAA. This model supports major enterprise and legacy systems, planning solutions, risk networks, blockchain, and healthcare data repositories. It integrates third-party live data sources like IoT, telematics, weather, traffic, and geopolitical data.

Pharma brands, CDMOs, suppliers, and carriers need to onboard just once to connect and transact with the 90,000 organizations already on the network. This network supports over a trillion USD worth of transactions, includes master data management tools, and a patented permissions framework for strict data access control.

### Value Across the Supply Chain Ecosystem

The network of networks model benefits the entire ecosystem, driving cost savings, cash flow improvements, and enhanced product margins. Working with pharma brands, companies can reduce upstream supply chain costs by 40-50% through higher planning accuracy and real-time issue resolution. Real-time visibility and orchestration help reduce channel inventory by 15-20%, improving working capital. Product margins can improve by 5-10% through better alignment of production capacities to product sell-through ratios, optimized product mix, and predictive identification of supply issues.

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