Performance: A priority
Performance in the clinical supply chain is increasingly becoming a priority in our industry. As material prices and trial complexity rise, shortages are more frequent while budgets are limited. It has never been so important for pharmaceutical companies to be able to track performance KPIs in their clinical supply chain.
The Gap
However, performance is highly volatile in our industry. We realize most efforts to minimize waste and costs of the clinical supply chain are done through careful planning, prior to the trial start. The problem is that trials are unpredictable, and the plans are always adapted. We also realize that, when no monitoring and optimization is performed while trials are ongoing, waste and cost KPIs at trial closure are miles away from the plan.
Today, little to no tools exist to track and monitor the performance throughout a trial lifecycle, or across a clinical trials portfolio, despite it being critical for clinical supply and program managers, as well as for the leadership of a pharmaceutical company.
With visibility on real clinical supply performance, budgeting and resource allocation decisions can be made. Within a program, it is also easier to understand where the supply chain could enable faster timelines, while understanding performance deviations is a strong learning for the teams to apply to future projects.
Identifying this gap, N-SIDE released this month its Global Performance Dashboard.
The past, the present, and the future
The N-SIDE Supply App optimizes clinical supply chain and planning, promising high performance from the beginning to the end of the trial. With the Global Performance Dashboards, we propose to automate the tracking of strategic KPIs (starting with waste and financial KPIs) over time and provide live reporting throughout the year. These performance metrics will be visible throughout the entire portfolio of a pharmaceutical company, with granularity per treatment, per trial or per program, and more.
Our dashboard shows not only the current performance as of today but also projected future performances as well as a retrospective view of the past.
KPIs are generally known to either be reactive (what happened, how can we improve for the future) or proactive (what is going to happen tomorrow if we do not change our decisions, driving action to correct it). While most tools track past data, which does not allow to be proactive, the N-SIDE global performance dashboard encompasses future forecasts as well.
The objective of the N-SIDE dashboards is therefore to enable both a proactive and a reactive use of clinical supply performance metrics. Users will be able to access real-time waste and clinical supply cost metrics across the treatments used in their clinical trials, with a granular history and future view of the evolution of their performances.
Impact
The N-SIDE Global Performance Dashboards are a complement to N-SIDE’s simulation and optimization solution, the Supply App. This solution is known for strongly increasing the performance of clinical supply chain, with early versions of these dashboards reporting a global waste below 30% for Pharma companies that had a waste level above 60% in the past.
Automating performance tracking and visibility for the companies’ leadership is a way to keep pushing for more efficient supply chains. Through a retrospective view of past performance, the impact of implementing waste and cost mitigation actions can be easily justified.
Identifying the root causes of deviations and understanding their global consequences on an entire program or portfolio drives further exploration of mitigation actions. This is why future developments of these dashboards will focus on diving deeper into the root causes of performance deviations.
Learn more
The N-SIDE Global Performance Dashboard was released recently and is currently being deployed.
Early versions were built on demand, and users provided positive feedback. The N-SIDE team expects that the availability of this new feature to all N-SIDE customers will strongly increase the value our solutions bring to pharmaceutical companies.
If you are an N-SIDE customer, do not hesitate to reach out to your point of contact to learn more. If you are considering N-SIDE as a partner, we are happy to schedule a short introduction and demo meeting.
A short demo video is available below.
Amaury Jeandrain
