Rewriting the pharma supply chain for a post-pandemic world
The pandemic has demonstrated the critical need for resilience and agility in pharma supply chains
The rollout of Covid-19 vaccines is a supply chain challenge like no other. For the first time in history, the race is on to get vaccines to as many people in the world as quickly as possible.
This has meant scaling up production, putting the right cold chain strategies in place, and determining the best form of storage, all at a time when lockdowns are in place and international travel is all-but banned.
What’s more, because the vaccine supply chain affects every person in the world in one way or another, the process has been subject to intense scrutiny.
“There are multiple complex interactions taking place that begin with forecasting and move through into production, storage, shipment, administration, reporting, and data management,” says Simon Geale, senior vice president for client solutions at the supply chain consultancy Proxima. “There are challenges during each phase, but collectively there are several potential points of failure, making it exponentially harder to control and predict.”
If your supply chain doesn’t go as planned – for instance, if there are export bans, the wrong type of equipment or a lower-than-anticipated yield – this can introduce volatility into the process. All of these eventualities have happened at some point during the vaccine rollout, meaning pharma companies have needed to make contingency plans.
“There are numerous points of potential failure, but, to a certain extent, failures are to be expected, particularly in such nascent supply chains. It doesn’t sound simple, and it isn’t,” says Geale.
Daniel Dombach, director of EMEA industry solutions at Zebra Technologies, adds that cold chain can pose a particular headache. This is especially the case with the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, which needs to be transported at ultracold temperatures. If the vaccine warms up too much during transit, the dose could become ineffective.
“Once the vaccine has arrived at the central point, it may need to be further distributed to a dedicated cooling warehouse, then moved on again to regional centres and finally to the point of vaccination,” he says.
