3 Trends I’m Following: Supply Chain
with Mar Gimeno, Head of Global Planning and Transformation, Teva Global Supply Chain
My name is Maria del Mar Delores Gimeno Frontera but I like to go by Mar. And I'm the Head of Global Planning and Transformation, part of Global Supply Chain in Teva Global Operations.
The three trends I'm watching right now in supply chain are: green supply chain, demand sensing and transformation in supply chain.
And we're going to start by talking about something very close to our hearts and that is climate change.
Climate change nowadays is something that everyone is looking at and all the industry is trying to combat the best way they can. By reducing the carbon footprint, or reducing all the greenhouse gases that they emit. Here in Teva, supply chain is responsible of bringing all the medicines to either our suppliers or our patients. And we're trying to go by any innovative means, to reduce all our carbon footprint; transport by air, road or ocean.
A great example is how we are managing our fleet in Germany. We're taking all the innovation we can. We change mirrors for cameras, we're installing solar panels in our trailers, we're using hydrogen or electric trucks for our distribution.
The second trend is demand sensing. In order for us to know how much we need to produce, we must know how much the patients need. This way we will be able to supply to the pharmacists the right amount of product.
It means we need to forecast so we have the right product at the right place at the right moment.
The last two years have been very turbulent. A pandemic and massive global worldwide events created a very big change in the demand in all the countries. And then it made it very difficult to forecast what was going to be the need of the products. And that's when demand sensing became such a global trend.
Demand sensing is a machine learning tool that will help us to predict what is going to be the forecast of our products in the future. It checks new trends and new events that will help us create this forecast.
For example, let's look at the cough and cold medication. Before, we were usually creating the forecast out of the past sales that we were doing. It means that we were just knowing what was the trend during the year and we would see a small peak during the winter season. Thanks to the demand sensing tool that we're using now, we can understand and predict better when those peaks will happen. Especially during the pandemic, the cough and cold season didn't happen only in winter. So we were able to predict better when all the waves of covid were going to happen. We're using demand sensing to provide all the trends to our teams and so they will be able to plan ahead and face all the supply challenges that maybe could happen.
The last trend is global supply chain transformation. The global world is changing in a very rapid way and it makes sense that all the supply chains would do a review on the strategy and capabilities in order to be able to make sure that those that count on us are having the product that they need. This is true for every industry, including pharma. So, we cannot continue working the same way we’ve worked up until now. We need to change, we need to adjust, become more agile so we can prepare ourselves to what is coming in the future. We're looking at every aspect of the supply chain; from the planner at the site preparing the production plan until the warehouse preparing all the shipment for our customers. We're doing this by enhancing all the capabilities of our team and our approach to the logistics of operations. Our goal is to be standardized, synchronized, and globally optimized so we meet the needs of this modern world.
