4flow collaborates with BD to reduce delivery lead times at a global scale.

BD (Becton Dickinson and Company) is a large international medical technology company with 70,000 employees, based in New Jersey. Its stated goal is to help improve medical discovery, diagnostics and the delivery of care.

The company has a presence in virtually every country, and it partners with organizations around the world to address some of the most challenging global health issues.

The BD Biosciences business unit manufactures and markets reagent products, which are sold worldwide for both clinical and research applications. Product lead time is crucial in the life sciences industry, and represents a key consideration for customers’ purchasing decisions. For this reason, BD Biosciences aimed to optimize its global supply and distribution network to reduce delivery lead time to customers and optimize its global inventory.

BD Biosciences turned to 4flow, a provider of supply chain consulting, software and fourth-party logistics (4PL) services, based in Berlin, Germany, for help reducing lead times. The scope of the project included BD Biosciences’ distribution network in the Americas, Europe, and Asia-Pacific regions and was carried out by an international team from both BD and 4flow.

Clinical and research reagents with 30,000+ stock-keeping units and hard-to-predict demand patterns with a long tail are very challenging to distribute across a global network. Product- and customer-specific shelf-life requirements, batch consistency and temperature requirements prevent leveraging economies of scale that are normally applied in other industries.

As a first step, 4flow supported BD Biosciences with network design. In this phase of the project, the optimal network setup was evaluated considering the trade-offs between lead time, inventory and costs. The centralized BD Biosciences production footprint and worldwide distribution, with a multi-stage distribution warehouse structure, was simulated with 4flow’s network simulation tools to determine the target setup regarding product flow, frequency and inventory level.

By applying different allocation scenarios, and changing the transportation service level, the project team found that doubling the frequency of global replenishments into the regional DCs would improve regional product availability without any cost increase.

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In addition to the instant availability of materials at regional DCs, another lever for improved lead time is a short turnaround time for processing customer orders. Together with BD Biosciences, 4flow defined several measures to increase operational excellence.

For example, these levers included optimized systemic order processing, improved cut-off times and a change in transportation modes. These measures, implemented by BD Biosciences in less than a year, impacted processes, systems and organization. As a result, tlead times in the core markets of the U.S. and Europe were reduced by 30% to 50%. In the overseas markets, lead time decreased by as much as 60%. BD also gained increased agility to prioritize urgent and ad-hoc customer requests. It increased global stock availability and was able to lower its safety stock. Further, the new efficiencies allowed same- and next-day delivery. Overall, the improved service level helped BD Biosciences differentiate itself from the competition and increase its market share in the reagent segment.

“What we valued most when collaborating with 4flow were the detailed data insights that ensured the information was accurate,” says Erin Templeton, senior program manager, business process excellence, at BD Biosciences. “Using such insights, we were able to create realistic targets through each phase of the project.”

Resource Links:

https://www.4flow.com/index.html

https://www.bdbiosciences.com/en-us