What Lessons Can be Learned From the COVID-19 Pandemic?
With the vaccine rollout gathering steam around the world and millions of people receiving their doses, it seems a good time to take a step back and see where we’ve been, where we are, and where we’re headed. The COVID-19 has certainly been a learning experience and we need to take stock and see what obstacles we’ve faced and how we can learn from them going forwards.
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The news has been rife since the beginning of the pandemic of contracts for medical supplies and PPE being given to companies which have had no experience in the field. This has resulted in billions of pounds of taxpayer money being wasted and left frontline staff without essential supplies.
We need to make sure the partners we choose to do business with have the correct expertise in medical logistics and are able to meet the demands of the role they are assigned. Do your research when it comes to selecting partners or you may find yourself doing business with a totally unsuitable organisation.
Digital Transformation
One thing we need to start taking more seriously is the need for digital transformation in the pharma supply chain – especially when it comes to cyber-security and cold chain monitoring. The manual processes of old are simply not going to cut it anymore and we need to find more sophisticated methods of maintaining our shipments during their journeys around the globe.
Internet of Things sensors built into shipments can monitor temperatures at every step in the supply chain and automatically report back to a central data hub. This combined with blockchain technology can create an immutable ledger of a shipment’s journey and enable experts to instantly identify weaknesses in the supply chain and address them before they lead to serious and costly mistakes.
Digital transformation is no longer optional, but essential.
From “Just in Time” to “Just in Case”
One thing the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed is our reliance on just in time supply chains and the weaknesses inherent in that system. You don’t have to cast your mind too far back to remember how many essential products were in short supply at the onset of the pandemic when people began panic buying.
We are not even out of the woods yet, with Johnson and Johnson still struggling to meet demand for symptom treating over the counter medicines such as Tylenol. This has been further compounded in the US by the FDA’s recent shutdown of three Tylenol producing plants over federal good manufacturing practice regulations.
This is leading to many logistics experts vouching for a switch to a just in case supply chain model where higher levels of essential items are kept in stock to help meet demand should another situation like the COVID-19 pandemic arise. Experts the world over have gone on record to state that pandemics are likely to become an increasing concern, so this switch in attitude would seem to be a prudent course of action to take.
Final Thoughts
There you have three solid lessons we can learn from the COVID-19 crisis and apply to the pharmaceutical logistics industry moving forwards. We were all playing catch up at the beginning of 2020, but there’s now no excuse not to learn from our mistakes and naivety and be better prepared in the future.