In the pharmaceutical industry, there’s a cold hard truth about supply chain operations: The industry loses roughly $35 billion annually because of failures in temperature-controlled logistics. Amazingly, those losses are almost entirely preventable — provided that we reimagine the pharmaceutical cold chain to become more digital and agile.

Today’s pharmaceutical cold chains are complex logistics networks with a large ecosystem of suppliers and transportation partners. Each part of this network, comprising suppliers, distributors and more, has unique requirements. To deliver as promised for patients, they must work in strict synchronicity, with seamless handoffs occurring at every stage of the journey.

While the task at hand might seem daunting, new technologies for supply chain visibility and control can mitigate cold chain losses resulting from missed handoffs, product spoilage, re-testing and compliance issues.

In recent years, the pharmaceutical industry has faced highly visible challenges, particularly relating to the development and global distribution of COVID-19 vaccines. The era has brought into sharp focus longstanding concerns around managing and monitoring every part of the supply chain, especially when it comes to ensuring cold-chain integrity. 

One of the key historic challenges in pharmaceutical cold chains has been a lack of information needed to make the right decisions across the entire journey of drugs and therapeutics, from development to patient. This shortfall of insight into why excursions occur, and the inability to prevent them, can lead to any number of problems, including poor planning, inaccurate predictions and delayed decision-making.

Given the value of products moving through the pharmaceutical supply chain, consistency of the cold chain is paramount. The slightest temperature variation in transit and storage can wreak havoc in pharmaceutical cold chains, spoiling entire batches of product and costing the industry billions in lost revenue.

It’s critical to have in place a system for accurately monitoring product location, dwell time, condition, movement history and more. Data must continuously realign between planning and real-time operations, to reflect what’s happening on the ground. This is crucial to enabling companies to reduce spoilage and waste, enhance security, and comply with regulations. 

Tracking Hard and Soft Attributes 

Companies seeking a proven framework for cold chain operational efficiency needn’t start from scratch. Many of the best modern-day approaches involve systems that extend well beyond visibility. They can track so-called “hard” and “soft” attributes within the supply chain, to achieve stronger quality control and faster resolution of issues before they affect cold-chain integrity. They also provide the ability to model supply chain processes or deviations before they occur, reducing unwanted surprises.

To track hard attributes, companies need visibility into the location and condition of goods and supplies in real time. Soft-attribute tracking, by contrast, involves granular knowledge of business processes and the identification of any exceptions or organizational bottlenecks. 

When pharmaceutical enterprises track both types of attributes together, they gain an exponentially more detailed view of the entire cold chain. Hard attribute-based tracking provides on-the-ground truth from sensors gathering information on raw materials, components and finished goods in real time. It answers questions like whether temperature excursions or excess delays happened in transit, or whether a component at rest in a warehouse or factory is damaged in any way. Such insights are then combined with soft-attribute tracking of business processes, such as whether a pricing discrepancy or paperwork issue is holding up the flow of materials in the cold chain. In the process, companies acquire a fuller picture of cold-chain health — one that enables faster identification and resolution of issues. The result is a more agile and resilient supply chain, drawing on data from many more sources. 

Reaping the Benefits

Successful implementations require that hard and soft attributes not only be identified, but also carefully orchestrated. Doing so involves combining data flows into a comprehensive picture of the overall health of the cold chain.

To make this a reality, information on location, condition, count, timestamps and more needs to be clearly visible and easily understood. It must flow in real time, allowing companies to flag and remediate issues almost as they occur.

Modern real-time supply chain operations platforms, which pull together all the required knowledge in a cohesive fashion, can be deployed without the need for large-scale IT spending. The best are cloud-based and equipped with state-of-the-art sensor, internet of things, digital twin, artificial intelligence and machine-learning technologies. They can be scaled easily and securely in line with the operation’s needs, while remaining agnostic to hardware, unstructured data sources and rapid technological evolution.

Technology innovations such as the introduction of digital twins into real-time operations enable the entire supply chain to be digitized and constantly monitored from multiple data sources. The result is a level of transparency that enables collaboration across all partners in the ecosystem. Digital twins can also help organizations improve their infrastructure and response time when hiccups do occur.

To address modern cold-chain challenges, pharmaceutical companies need to move from siloed operations and reactive approaches to real-time insights and continuous orchestration. They must remove legacy barriers to enhance the management of data at every stage of the supply chain. Such an approach enables intelligent digitization throughout the ecosystem. Done properly, this approach eliminates “blind spots” and facilitates seamless control across suppliers, logistics, factories, warehouses, distribution centers and last-mile delivery.

By modeling supply chains, embedding intelligence into operations and models, and deploying digital twins for collective insight and collaboration, pharmaceutical supply chains can align planning and execution with ground truths to improve service levels and maintain security, quality and compliance standards, including those relating to environmental, social and governance (ESG) goals. The result is better business outcomes, including more efficient operations, higher profitability, less waste and better product quality.

Mahesh Veerina is president and CEO of ParkourSC.