Supply Chain Optimization
Ensure Drugs Are on the Shelf When Customers Need Them
Collaborating across the entire supply chain is an important goal for Pharmaceutical companies. This type of efficiency can increase sales because all parties – from retailer to manufacturer to raw materials supplier – have constant access to information and can react to actual demand for products globally at all times. Additionally, companies desire to squeeze out operational costs due to fragmented, highly distributed supply chains, manual or ad-hoc processes, and inconsistent, error prone data about product, pricing, and packaging. These inefficiencies lead to missed deadlines, delayed promotions, lost revenue, and unhappy retail partners and customers.
To ensure sufficient supply of a flu drug at all times, a drug manufacturer needs to predict the global impact of flu conditions. For example, the 2009 swine flu pandemic required close collaboration with suppliers to ensure adequate raw materials. Manufacturers also need constant supply visibility during distribution so they can quickly divert supply to alternate destinations experiencing greater demand.
TIBCO's event-driven infrastructure and business process management (BPM) technology is being used by pharmaceutical companies to automate, integrate, and collapse the supply chain. A product purchase triggers a real-time movement of demand information that is correlated with events occurring in all stores, warehouses, retailer headquarters, manufacturers, and suppliers. TIBCO's complex event processing (CEP) technology and visualization technologies analyze and predict future purchasing trends. Thus, pharmaceutical companies can supply enough product to meet demand – even agilely diverting supply from location to location as needed.
