Every aspect of business continues to evolve as the need to meet operational resilience requirements becomes a greater priority. That can be within businesses moving on from aging business continuity plans in the face of changing markets and operating environments to those adopting organisational flexibility to better compete.
Whatever the underlying need for change, operational resilience is the current focus for many pharmaceutical firms. They seek to adopt a unified approach to supply chain, operations, warehousing and/or retail. While building in predictive features, preventative maintenance and planning, and using AI to analyse large quantities of data.
The resilience aspect can extend to workforce management and other departments or across multiple facilities, creating external partnerships to develop stronger stock/sales insights and flexibility.
The Need for Stronger Operational Resilience Within Pharma
Issues from politically motivated tariffs, cyberattacks and local market shakeups to the shipping challenges in the Middle East create immense leadership and operational challenges for pharmaceutical companies. Retooling the business so that it can proactively see the next changes incoming, and adapt to meet them is a key flex that delivers operational improvements, minimises the cost hits of such shocks and supports teams across the business to change their thinking from reactive to proactive.
Driving this change are connected business applications, SaaS tools, custom APIs and, more recently AI with the power to predict and identify nuanced changes. All working together to create a unified picture of the business and operations, and then predicting future patterns or changes, and delivering insights on how best to respond.
But these changes are not all about pure exercises in math and data, typically badged as business transformation. Physical and smart systems also help monitor supply chain performance, from the temperature of active ingredients and materials in transit to worker efficiency and safety on product production lines.
Consider any modern pharma or medical facility using healthcare security solutions. The modern, cloud and AI-enabled equivalent supports tracking access controls from vehicles to patients at hospitals or chemists and monitoring high-value stocks in warehouses and in transit, while providing smart communications for security and safety teams as they respond to incidents, be they chemical, criminal or corporate camaraderie.
These systems create more data through video records and analytics, with patterns that can highlight footfall changes or wasted space. At the personal level, body-worn cameras can demonstrate interactions between staff, customers, partners and patients, and show the need for training or different approaches to those interactions to deliver a higher quality or more efficient service.
That data can feed back insights into designs for future facilities, with AI delivering the most efficient journeys for everything that moves within a pharmacy store, factory or hospital.
The Benefits of Pharma Operational Resilience
At its core, operational resilience helps leadership develop future-proof strategies that can cope with issues like fast-moving needs for innovative medicines and fluctuations in supply chains as well as more unpredictable issues like extreme weather impacts. Leadership buy-in for operational resilience is key for driving change, ensuing funding for adoption and the necessary impetus for change programmes.
Managers can provide data highlighting the need for operational changes and what facilities or workforce requirements can help deliver them. They can subsequently track the results and benefits as pilots or full rollouts occur. Evolving to an ongoing improvement system, that’s always adapting to change, rather than waiting for the pharma to be hit hard by change.
All of which will help workers understand why changes are taking place and how they can continue to add value, whatever their role. While the typical focus will lead to driving medical innovation, ensuring constant supplies and access to ingredients, operational resilience and smart planning can avoid larger issues like a hospital building being too weak for the helicopter landing pad or changing regional water supplies meaning that a planned 2030 factory could never operate.
Whatever the resilience plan, key to success are transparent success metrics, access to the data, understanding of the benefits and risks of AI. All wrapped up in physical and cyber security systems to protect the company, its hardware and data against a changing physical landscape and unpredictable digital future.
