Pharmaceutical Supply Chain and Portfolio Planning

Pharma and Life Sciences developers face unprecedented challenges: rising R&D investments, elusive returns, perilous late-stage approval efforts, and impending patent expirations. The terrain is no less rocky for manufacturers and distributors. Pharma supply chains are as complex, volatile, and risk-prone as any in modern industry. The growth of emerging markets, contract manufacturing, and new medicines and ingredients only drives uncertainty higher.

Whether for manufacturing, supply chain, or R&D and portfolio planning, Vanguard IBP for Pharma delivers powerful analytics in a collaborative cloud platform to help you and your teams plan the future — together.

Supply chain planning

Health disasters happen. What if hospitals stock out of life-saving antidotes because of an active ingredient shortage, a sourcing contamination, or a production failure? These real challenges make supply chain IT critical, especially in an industry already marked by high supplier variability, strict fulfillment requirements, and tight expiration constraints.

Vanguard IBP for Pharma starts your process with exceptionally accurate baseline forecasts. From there, powerful analytics derive optimal order quantities, production schedules, safety stock levels, and multi-echelon warehouse assignments. Additional capabilities, whether for demand planning, inventory optimization, or supply chain integration, are designed to help mitigate the effects of supply-demand volatility and ensure the safest and most profitable delivery of critical products.

Over the past two decades, Vanguard Software has developed state-of-the-art modeling and simulation capabilities that are now available on a collaborative cloud platform. Our system is designed to synthesize massive and complex product-development data into the best possible investment decisions and outcomes.

R&D pipeline and portfolio planning

R&D decision managers must commit huge sums to projects with untold development timelines (Case Study), extreme technical and regulatory uncertainty, and vastly diverse stages of development. While it’s impossible to know which projects will bear fruit, the pressure to replenish future revenues is relentless, turning the development pipeline into a massive risk-reward portfolio — difficult management requirements and high stakes.

Advanced analytics, including Monte Carlo simulation, enable unlimited what-if testing, exceptional scenario planning, and automation of routine decisions. Matched with easy-to-use workflow and collaboration features, diverse user sets can share and refine prognostications to better navigate:

• New and changing regulatory environments
• Patent expirations
• Shortfalls of new or imminent approvals
• Long-range investment in drug pipelines and future revenues
• Uncertainty over insurance coverage, new product adoption

Full-suite capability, best-in-market usability

Leverage Vanguard Software for part, or all, of your S&OP, IBP, or portfolio management process: from sales forecasting to supply planning to financial forecasting and budgeting. Vanguard can integrate all of these diverse applications on a single platform designed to unify management estimates, exceptions, and data. The system’s UI integrates seamlessly with your business processes, enabling diverse teams and users to communicate and collaborate. Plus, all changes and updates are dynamic, system-wide. Change your demand plan, and see that change reflect instantly in your inventory order schedule – and on the same screen.