Pharma CEOs and investors need supply chain knowledge
To date, none have any...
Picture a pharma supply chain, if you can
As a patient, what picture comes to mind when you think of pharmaceutical supply-chains?
Not a single one?
Lorries pulling up at the hospital unloading bay?
Vans delivering into your local pharmacy?
If those are mainly the pictures that come to mind, you should get a lot out of this post.
It’s more complicated than that!
There is much more to it than that, as you may have guessed. That is only the tip of the iceberg—the last leg of a very long journey.
A drug passes through a series of production stages, beginning with raw materials.
Then the drugs and their components travel tens, if not hundreds of thousands of miles. They go through multiple airports, seaports, countries, and continents.
They are acted upon, handed over, acted upon again, handed over again… …and so it goes. The typical length, from beginning to receipt of the product in your hand, is around three years. That is the cumulative lead-time.
This means that companies at the beginnin…