Supply chain disruption in the healthcare market in 2022

How do you measure and mitigate?

Whether it’s pharmaceuticals, vaccines, generics, animal health products or the supply of medical consumables to the NHS, the current phrase on everyone’s lips is ‘supply chain disruption’.

European companies in particular are looking to source from an ever-wider range of suppliers and countries, adding more and more complexity into supply chains.

Today, speed of supply isn’t always the most important factor for organisations; with many prioritising supply chain resilience instead. Given current supply chain constraints, companies are having to make challenging decisions on where, how and when to move their goods, simply to balance the risks involved. Trade-offs between cost of supply and customer service are now also finely balanced.

So how do you measure and mitigate against future disruption?

The short answer is don’t abandon your KPIs. Setting up and maintaining key performance indicators is the only way to check and improve processes to ensure visibility of supply chain performance. Once effective KPIs are in place, you have to actively use them! Regular analysis of KPIs is an important driver in the quest to maintain and improve each step of the supply chain both locally and globally. With metrics in place, supply chain professionals can gain an edge by actively reducing costs to their business whilst simultaneously fine-turning service to the end user.

Maintaining better supply chain resilience is ultimately all about data.

• Do you know your total delivered cost?
• Do you know your landed cost and profitability at a customer level?
• Do you know the total time for a product to pass through the supply chain from start to finish?
• Are your customer service metrics relevant to your customer?
• Are you measuring on-time and in-full deliveries right down to order level?

At Ligentia, our analytics capability all links back to the vast range and amount of data we hold within our proprietary software, Ligentix. It empowers the performance measurement of supplier, carrier, haulier, 3rd parties as well as our own delivery of milestones along each critical path.

In summary Ligentix delivers three unique points of value to our customers:

1. Exception management – Means a user only needs to focus on the small number of orders, falling out of agreed tolerance levels and thus requiring response. This alleviates the burden of time involved in complex supply chain management and creates freedom to focus on strategic priorities.
2. Live visibility – Our PO-centric design gives visibility right down to the individual item/SKU level. This information is supplemented with live feeds from shipping lines and hauliers to ensure up to the minute control for altogether better supply chain decision making.
3. Richness of the data – We gather and store data, which means we can report in fine detail to deliver development reports and plans to reduce lead times or costs, to manage suppliers and carriers and to ultimately increase end-to-end efficiency to across the entire supply chain.

For more information on how to mitigate your healthcare supply chain risk, click here to get in touch.