Keeping the Supply Chain Healthy

This North American based global organization is one of the worlds largest and most respected pharmaceutical-healthcare companies. Their worldwide businesses discovers and develops human and animal health products at eight major research centers in the United States, Europe, and Japan with manufacturing, chemical processing, drug formulation, and packaging operations that are carried out in 31 facilities in the United States, Europe, Central and South America, the Far East, and the Pacific Rim.

Challenges & Objectives

Transition, manage and implement new global business practices while improving visibility, maintaining strict compliance issues and reducing overall supply chain costs.

Strategy

Create standardized operating procedures across all business units, utilizing internal systems technology that promotes global communication, regulatory compliance and cold chain protocols. Accomplished by incorporating our seven step approach: site visits, flow chart processes, develop standard operating procedures (SOP's), process validation, test transactions, create and modify a quality management review scorecard.

Customized Solution

Utilize internal resources and business tools from our transition and implementation teams to improve existing business practices, create operating procedures and utilize technology based solutions to improve supply chain velocity.

The combined challenge was to reduce overall supply chain costs, eliminating business process duplicity, while maintaining rigorous demands in the areas of export-import compliance, free trade zone protocols and managing cold chain mandates.

Expeditors understood the unique challenges facing the pharma-healthcare industry today. Our approach was to understand and view the total business environment.

This program required operating knowledge in the following areas:

• Understanding temperature control - cold chain management
• Maintaining Velocity - on-time delivery
• Delivering door to door services
• Managing product integrity - clean, secure environment
• Providing event driven visibility
• Monitoring FDA Compliance
• Supporting free trade zone management protocols

Our immediate and foremost challenge was to prepare a worldwide transition document that identified key requirements and deliverables. All processes were flow charted and documented to create the standard operating procedures.

These vital steps were available to the worldwide transition and implementation team, global account manager, operations and sales management via the Expeditors transition and implementation managers database. Our internally created technology tools were enhanced for this pharma client.

An exception based report management system was created to alert the Expeditors staff of any product delays en route to final destination. The system would allow for the management staff to use the reports to identify, intercept and reroute any product, in our care, regardless of whether it came from the customer, the foreign trade zone or from a vendor / supplier.

Overall, our success in transitioning, implementing and delivering a sound and measurable product was proven a success by our achieving a score of 90% or better at the quarterly, quality measurement review (QMR) meeting.

Expeditors' ability to offer full visibility of products in our care, identify and manage through exception based reporting any product irregularities, support a North American free trade zone environment and offer robust technology to enhance these vital processes has proven successful.