Clarkston Consulting recently partnered with a life sciences company to tackle a global supply chain process design project. The client, founded in 2010, had quickly grown into a global biotech company, receiving health agency approvals for two of their leading drug candidates in 2019. With an extensive partnership network and a strong R&D drug pipeline, the client’s growth is expected to continue in the future, requiring a strong organizational and operational infrastructure to enable their supply chain to commercialize and deliver therapeutics to patients globally.

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The client’s supply chain design is immature, with fragmented policies and processes by region and little, if any, harmonized operational approaches. The client is cognizant that the current state is not sustainable as the company continues to grow. Additionally, the client had a lack of supply chain documentation necessary to help achieve an understanding of the complexity and foster standardization across regions. Standardization of supply chain processes and a robust and agile technology platform is necessary to enable the company to meet its business objectives.

As a result of this project, the client recognized the complexity of the different global supply chains and the importance of standardizing business processes before executing upon a transformational project to automate supply chain operations via the SAP platform.

The primary objectives of this project for the team included identifying and documenting the client’s end-to-end commercial and clinical global supply chain process to understand breadth and depth of responsibilities. The goal was to develop future end-to-end supply chain models for Level 1-3 processes to capture each supply chain network’s overall scope for both commercial and clinical operations.

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This partnership resulted in the team performing a rapid assessment of the organization’s current state strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities through more than 30 interviews and deep data analysis. They collaborated with key stakeholders, including regional leadership, to design the guiding principles of the new business model that would be prioritized as part of strategy development, and created new supply chain models that identified and standardized the core configurations and elements of a global supply chain process design. This would be used in comparison analysis for highlighting differences and similarities to drive overall process harmonization. The result of the project helped define leading clinical and commercial supply chain processes and requirements used for the solution design of the SAP implementation​.

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Contributions by Aley Morris.