The pharmaceutical industry is one of the fastest-growing economic sectors. Digitization would help companies in the long run and give them an edge over their competitors in understanding and predicting consumer demand and increasing supply chain efficiency. In the wake of COVID-19, digitalised technology has become more important than ever in allowing firms to improve performance through better planning, accurate manufacturing productivity based on forecasts, stronger competitive skills, and financial sustainability. A new McKinsey Global Survey of Chief executives reported that their companies' digitization of customer and supply-chain contacts and internal operations has grown by three to four years.

The Benefits of Digitization

For the future success of pharma, it would be beneficial to adopt a digitized approach from the very beginning of the supply chain so that products can be shipped to customers in a real-time manner and problems can be identified at an early stage. Digitization would allow companies to fully integrate their supply chains and improve operational processes by gathering a huge amount of data for analysis in supply chain operations that are currently unavailable due to their physical nature. Pharma businesses will see this as an opportunity to expand digital adoption throughout the commercial supply chain, including distribution and order fulfillment.

It will ultimately add more value to the entire supply chain process and help make better and faster decisions. It has led to a significant change in supply chain management by reducing labor requirements for distribution, transportation, and production.

Digitization Techniques Improve Pharmaceutical Operations

Digitization is considered a complex task because of cybersecurity risks. However, with the advancements and rapid pace of technology change, pharma companies, like other sectors, should plan to prioritize digitizing their operations and supply chain without further delay.

Blockchain, IoT, and cloud-based software are a few examples of digitization that pharmaceutical organizations can use to improve and monitor every link in the supply chain in real-time, keeping a close watch on their inventory at the same time. Blockchain has the potential to revolutionize the pharmaceutical sector by introducing three critical elements: privacy, transparency, and traceability. It will aid in developing industry rules, practices, privacy, and worldwide regulations. It can also assist pharmaceutical companies in tracking and tracing medications. The organization will be able to track production materials and products at each point in the supply chain. Further, it will allow for data to be shared easily among different downstream and upstream partners leading to improved communication and collaboration and more efficient operations.

Hassle-Free Manufacturing and Packaging of Medicines

Digital transformation of the pharma product supply infrastructures should be implemented from manufacturing the medicines to dispensing the medicines to patients. It will lead to drastic changes in business models and global manufacturing operations. With the high level of automation and real-time global ecosystem connectivity, medicine manufacturing and packaging can become globally transparent and distributed in a more controlled fashion given the regulatory constraints and requirements. According to Fortune Business Insights, the worldwide packing machinery market was worth $40.08 billion in 2019 and is expected to grow to $52.83 billion by 2027, at a CAGR of 3.6% during the forecast time-frame.
The key areas to focus on are:

  • Manufacturing processes and intelligence
  • Packaging execution and inventory management
  • Supply chain integration with better traceability and communication
  • Enterprise back-end IT services utilize the data from the product supply.

The Role of ML and AI in Healthcare Sector

Machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) have also started to find their way into the patient care system. We are not very far from when there will be virtual clinical care service providers helping the patients use the collected sensor data and artificial intelligence to improve the care outcome, and all the information will be stored in an app for future reference.

Machine learning and AI techniques must reach their full potential before being utilized in this field. For instance, many prediction models have not been able to achieve their full potential due to new data not being available at regular intervals. The continuous availability of new data allows the algorithms to learn and adapt to the changing environment. The pharmaceutical industry has a growing trend to incorporate machine learning and AI techniques in their research activities.

Get the solution from us: How can CosmoTrace help?
In this digital era of healthcare, it is essential to have a digital supply chain and digitized customer interactions. The digital revolution is changing the game's rules in the healthcare industry. We are helping the companies focus on enhancing their digital strategies by using new communication channels and technologies to operate with greater agility, cost-efficiency, and control; and ultimately achieve sustainable competitive advantage. We are a life sciences consulting, implementation & integration services company focused on product serialization. We aim to serve our clients by planning and implementing complex serialization solutions. We help our clients with managing end-to-end serialization & life sciences projects.

Our team of experts strategize and plan end-to-end solutions using a combination of years of knowledge in product serialization, pharmaceutical supply chains, life sciences and brand integrity.

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