A Guide for Pharmaceutical Control Towers

Despite Pharma investing lots of time and attention towards that partnership selection process, primarily relying on specifications, models, simulations and mapping studies is not going to guarantee that your network performs as advertised. 

Pharma must leverage historically aggregated performance and risk data from within its own network and beyond to ensure that the ‘practice’ matches the ‘theory’ – that its partners deliver upon what is tested and validated throughout the qualification process.  

2. Develop a logistics control tower (LCT) strategy that maximizes outcome-based delivery and minimizes costs

Two considerations:  

• Home-grown control towers: Typically limited in functionality, built on dated tech stack & architecture, no intelligence / AI, and expensive to maintain ($300K-$500K / year), let alone improve 

• Non-agnostic control towers: Leveraging a control tower associated with device providers of LSPs requires multiple, non-standardized platforms across multiple providers, as devices and LSPs are most often parallel-sourced. No ability to consolidate data from all providers in one view / one holistic network analysis. Limited functionality (e.g. no product release, SOP management, lane qualification & risk assessment, etc.) 

• Your organization has done ample testing of IoT data and have decided that IoT will be the single source of truth for time, location and temperature readings
• Your organization has implemented a single sourcing strategy, where there may be just one preferred IoT, packager, or 3PL / 4PL with limited change expected

Having a data agnostic control tower from day one provides resiliency, optionality and enables Pharma to overlay its network data with a robust and holistic data trust layer while continuously being able to plug & play their service offerings which frequently go through changes and updates.

3. Drive compliance with your monitoring partners to implement technology and reduce hyper-care costs 

If your company is paying your Logistics Service Provider (LSP) partners $100, $200 or even $300 to monitor and potentially take action on a shipment, you are overpaying.  

LSPs charge a substantial amount to monitor shipments because they require significant overhead to monitor, investigate and take action on each device alert.  

Reacting to device alerts is not sustainable, nor is it scalable (lest you be OK with spending millions per year on monitoring).  

Your control tower should have the ability to contextualize holistic risk across a shipment, prioritize necessary action and suppress alerts that pose no real risk to the product.  

4. Leverage a control tower that has built-in automated product release 

Automated product release is not a unicorn – there are a number of platforms that can enable this and that are GxP validated. The blocker – historically – has come from Pharma’s reluctance to 1.) invest in GxP vendor validation, and 2.) ‘outsource’ or ‘automate’ any part of its product quality process where product quality decisions are made. 

⚡Pro tip: if you are a vendor and have a ‘val pack’ – a validation package that already demonstrates that your company and specific product features (that are tied to quality decisions) have been validated, you are ahead of the game. 

While GxP validation is not easy to obtain and maintain, if your company is ISO certified and SOC II Type II compliant and you can pass your audits, you’re ~75% of the way to there. 

The ability to automate product quality and release decisions whereby a product gets ‘approved, rejected or quarantined’ reduces the amount of administrative overhead a quality team needs to invest to make the manual assessment.  

So long as Pharma can develop trust and confidence with the provider around their own quality and data management processes, digitizing and automating product release yields significant productivity benefits. 

5. Open the lines of communication across your entire business and Procurement early – hold innovation summits and product roadmap discussions at least 2X / year 

Large organizations can lack transparency and cross-business unit communication to understand which tools and processes are being utilized by their peers.  

It’s not until Procurement gets involved or that a formal RFI / RFP process gets underway, that business leaders learn of tools that may already be in place, or are being tested / piloted as a part of other business units, functions or areas.  

Often times, this results in time wasted, or sub-optimization of economies of scale if multiple vendors are being used to provide similar services.  

Further, there are tools in the market that can provide many capabilities under one roof, whether it be an agnostic visibility control tower, exceptions management, lane qualification, lane performance and risk assessment, or Gen-AI.  

Ok – maybe that last part is just PAXAFE J. But you get the picture. Your vendor partners can and do often times provide a broader capability that other parts of your business may be looking for.