Packaging, supply & logistics 50% Deloitte and Advamed
Connected devices that make up the entire portfolio of companies surveyed.
development hit roadblocks, its manufacturing arm offered its services to the companies that had beaten GSK to market. It’s not the pharmaceutical industry of 2019 anymore. “If there’s an opportunity for one company to make their capacity available to another, we will do exactly that,” Connor said. “That behaviour is the sort of thing that we’re seeing across the world and we need to continue to do.” For the most part, these are still point-to-point connections between companies, so their efficiency is limited, but the willingness to share is unprecedented.
Make it work Vaccines aren’t like most products, but, according to Shawn Muma, technology research leader for the Digital Supply Chain Institute, companies everywhere are making a mantra of the words “don’t waste a good pandemic”. Boston Scientific, for instance, has begun using an IBM Cloud solution built on open- source Hyperledger blockchain technology to provide real-time information to stakeholders across its medical device network. While piloting the technology in Colombia in 2020 – at the height of Covid-19, no less – the company reduced average order fulfilment times down from nearly a week to 36 hours, as reported by IBM.
“In that world, we become our own supply chain. Today it’s all about scale, and in that model, companies typically create moats around themselves using information to support their competitive advantage.”
Mark Treshock
That’s a positive first step, but the acute shortage of semiconductors and silicon chips – the hardware required to set up and use blockchains, along with almost everything else – is now complicating things. Every sector of the economy is scrambling for stock. Two-thirds of medical device companies that contributed to a recent study by Deloitte and Advamed reported that they use semiconductors in more than half of their products. Half of the companies surveyed also noted that connected devices make up almost 50% of their entire portfolio. For the most part, these developers use the same second and third-generation chips as the reeling automotive, industrial, and consumer industries, and, accordingly, every single respondent reported disruption to their chip supply chain. Clearly, the question of digitalisation is already tied up in the challenge of building more resilient supply chains. With previously distinct industries now competing for the same components, monitoring and
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sharing information about the entire supply chain is more important than ever. Prior to Covid-19, Muma recalls companies gesturing towards using digitalisation to achieve full supply chain visibility at some point in the future. Now, however, “enterprise walls are coming down and businesses are looking horizontally across the entire supply chain, versus vertically, as they did in the past”. The best model Handfield’s seen for this is Californian company Flex’s ‘Pulse’ global visibility system, which makes it possible for the business to monitor inventory across all its global supply chains instantaneously. The technology itself, a set of modules that take, extract and standardise specific data feeds from the company’s enterprise systems so they can be viewed on a single global dashboard, is simple; cleaning and preparing those data feeds to provide useful, legible information isn’t. That said, the attention the Flex system requires companies to devote to assessing their data could help them to realise how much of it is suited for wider publication. In Muma’s experience, most businesses are yet to develop a set of data standards, let alone establish a process for identifying and approving what they’re willing to share. He breaks the solution down into three general categories: “the data that gives you a competitive advantage that you’d be unwilling to share; what’s beneficial to share, though it might be in a grey area; and the stuff that should be in the open domain because other people can use it to make you more efficient”. “Over time,” he adds “people realise that a lot of the stuff they put in the protected bucket can in fact be shared without a lot of risk and that in fact they can generate ROI by doing so.”
A lot more than ROI is at stake as vaccines are distributed, or when PPE runs low – not to mention in the future model of personalised healthcare, where connected devices and diagnostics constantly feed data to health professionals and suppliers, and the raw materials for therapies are sourced from patients themselves. “In that world,” says Treshock, “we become our own supply chain. Today it’s all about scale, and in that model, companies typically create moats around themselves using information to support their competitive advantage.
“For personalised medicine, it will be necessary to fluidly share information because these samples need to be temperature controlled both ways, and if there’s a mix up in the final treatment, the consequences will be grievous: possibly or probably death.” Before long, there could be millions of those critical shipments travelling on literal and virtual roads. Personalised healthcare shows just what individualism can achieve, but it will take a community to make it work. ●
Medical Device Developments /
www.nsmedicaldevices.com
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