Amgen is a $19bn company dedicated to discovering, developing and manufacturing human therapeutics for serious illnesses. The company draws on an extensive range of raw materials and medical devices from suppliers worldwide. To support those efforts, it maintains a supply-chain resiliency program that operates under the adage “every patient, every time.”

“We’ve never shorted the market – never had a patient go without life-saving medicine,” says Turney.

The challenge becomes greater all the time. Amgen used to work with more suppliers closer to home. Now they’re dispersed all over the globe. Still, Turney says, the company needs to assert “24/7 oversight of our supply chain.”

Amgen went in search of a new tool to support its supplier-management efforts. It needed to ensure visibility, reliability and security. All were key elements in the company’s desire to acquire mapping technology that would allow for the creation of a “war room” in times of crisis.

Amgen’s choice of a vendor was Resilinc, which bases its cloud-delivered technology on the Salesforce platform. The company already had numerous clients in high-tech, automotive and medical, Turney notes. Suppliers were open to the use of cloud technology and the presence of a third party with whom they could trust their trade secrets and intellectual property.

Already Amgen has acquired first-time visibility of some tier-two suppliers, Turney says. After a year and a half, the company has mapped its tier-one suppliers, and is now venturing into tier two. It hopes to have the project wrapped up and fully implemented by the end of 2015.

The benefits are already evident. According to Turney, the company was able to respond to fires in the San Diego area, where several suppliers were forced to shut down operations temporarily. “We got an immediate list of who’s in that area and close to the catastrophe, so that we could call them and get updates about their plans,” she said.

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