Leigh Anderson, Managing Director at Bis Henderson Recruitment discusses logistics skills the panacea the pharma sector needs.
The pharmaceutical retail, wholesale and distribution sector is ‘in play’, as they say on the markets. The group around Lloyds Pharmacy (retail) and AAH Pharmaceuticals (wholesale) has been acquired by Aurelius; Walden have bought Movianto, joining Eurotranspharma and Ciblex and so bolstering their claim to be ‘the European leader in transport and logistics for pharma’; and takeover rumors swirl around Walgreen-owned Boots/Alliance, along with other companies in the UK and Europe.
In parallel with this market activity, we are seeing a marked upswing in recruitment for senior and middle-ranking logistics and supply chain posts in the sector. And it’s hardly surprising, as wider skill sets from pertinent related sectors will be needed.
Changes in ownership invariably trigger reviews of business strategies and consequent reassessment of whether the right skills and expertise are in place to achieve the new goals. But this comes on top of more fundamental changes that have been triggered or accelerated by the Covid pandemic.
Restructuring, and pharmacy involvement in vaccine rollouts, has prompted significant and ongoing investment in new distribution centres, final mile delivery and automation – including robotic dispensing solutions. In addition, the pandemic has revealed critical dependencies, especially for packaging and drug delivery supplies, which has pushed supply chain resilience higher up on corporate agendas.
More fundamentally, the pandemic has accelerated the digitalisation of medicine, including pharmacology. Pressure on general practice has been met by ramping up the NHS Direct platform, and by a boom in private sector on-line medicine, through firms such as Babylon, PushDoctor and Lloyds Pharmacy Clinical Homecare. And this is extending to the on-line ordering of drugs and therapies, particularly repeat prescriptions, for delivery Direct-to-Patient.
The processes are analogous to, but with significant differences from, consumer eCommerce. Direct-to-Patient promises to be more convenient, to reduce waste, to encourage better course adherence by patients, as well as helping to control the problem of parallel imports. Better visibility of demand can be fed into predictive analytics for further improvement. But exactly what this might mean for the role of wholesalers is still in question.
The vaccine development and roll-out process has also highlighted the importance of accurate logistics to clinical trials, where any supply failure risks negating months or years of development work and delaying the deployment of valuable therapies.
Healthcare is a data-rich environment and there is now a real emphasis on using sophisticated data analytics, to quote Walden, “to optimise logistics processes and streamline flows both within health entities (pharmacies, hospitals), and also directly to patients”. Digitalisation is rapidly being applied to a host of regulatory requirements, from real-time traceability to quality control, market authorisation, pharmaceutical release, Customs brokerage, and more.
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