Strengthening pharmaceutical supply chain resilience
You can’t strengthen something if you don’t know weakness exists. USP’s Medicine Supply Map enhances transparency of the upstream pharmaceutical supply chain to help identify vulnerabilities and deliver insights that can guide risk mitigation strategies and investment in supply chain resilience.
A more transparent medicine supply chain can help governments, manufacturers, distributors and providers to protect patients and strengthen the supply chain by reducing the frequency and duration of drug shortages and the presence of poor-quality medicines in the market.
Visibility to identify vulnerabilities and lower quality risks
The pharmaceutical supply chain is constantly responding to variables ranging from natural disasters to regional geopolitical climates. In this ever-changing landscape, it’s critical to track factors that could impact manufacturing and product availability. USP’s Medicine Supply Map analyzes information from disparate data sources and extracts relevant insights, that identify, characterize and quantify risk and resilience of the upstream pharmaceutical supply chain.
Limited medicine inventories make risk analysis more important than ever
Most drugs only have a 1- to 6-month supply of product filling the entire supply chain, caused, in part, by just-in-time production and pressures to minimize inventory-on-hand. This may not provide enough inventory and lead to drug shortages in the event of demand spikes, as in the case of the global coronavirus pandemic, or due to unanticipated decreases in production. Without early warning signals, stakeholders are left with little flexibility to respond when unanticipated changes in supply or demand occur.
Imagine a world where the supply chain is well understood. If there is an outage at an API manufacturer, providers, regulators and other stakeholders can immediately assess what drug products might be at risk of shortage. When a hurricane or flood occurs in a distant or near part of the world, stakeholders know what medicines are manufactured there that might be at risk of a shortage.
Armed with these and other forewarnings about the likelihood of a shortage for specific products, providers and manufacturers can improve the resiliency of their supply chains and take actions to help prevent the shortage from occurring.
Data-driven assessment and decision making
The Medicine Supply Map identifies, characterizes and quantifies risk and resilience in the upstream medicine supply chain. USP leverages information about the locations of manufacturing sites producing active pharmaceutical ingredient and finished drugs, as well as other product information like ingredients, dosage form, market size, price and other factors based on its expertise and knowledge to characterize and quantify a medicine’s vulnerability. USP’s unique insights based on a multitude of data sources and expertise create a comprehensive view of the upstream supply chain that can highlight risk. This level of visibility enables a holistic understanding and anticipation of risk.
The Medicine Supply Map is built on a scalable, flexible platform. Its rich data set can easily be augmented with external data sources to customize queries that address unique information needs.
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