Future-Ready Supply Chains

The COVID-19 pandemic has several lessons for India Pharma Inc as it embraces new strategies and technologies to rebuild and fortify its supply chain

- Lakshmi Priya Nair

The COVID-19 pan-demic underscored the need for a radical overhaul in supply chain management, especially in the life sciences sector. Faced with challenges unprecedented in scale and scope, the sector had to reassess its approaches and strategies to contain and mitigate the impact of the pandemic on its global supply chain.

Over a year after the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, as the world starts to plan for recovery, it is time to revisit the lessons learnt about supply chain reliability and risk and take stock of the measures being undertaken by the pharma industry to build supply chain resilience.

Especially so, since it is becoming evident that disruptions are likely to increase in regularity and scale, caused by varying factors including emerging pathogens, geopolitical events, climate changes and public health disasters.

The supply chain of the future will be defined majorly by the following characteristics:

Flexibility and agility

As closed borders, nationwide lockdowns triggered fears of drug shortages on a global scale, highlighting the dangers of over-reliance on few sources of supply, the pharma and healthcare sectors were forced to adapt and innovate to develop local capacity and secure local supply.