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As the pharmaceutical and healthcare industries grapple with unprecedented challenges—record-level drug shortages, rising manufacturing costs, complex demand forecasting, and the list goes on—the need for simple, fast, and cost-effective digital integration between supply chain partners has never been greater. This increased level of integration is the first step to improving visibility and giving pharma supply chain leaders the intelligence they need to reduce supply risk, lower costs, boost the efficiency of manufacturing and logistics operations, and improve customer service levels.
It's clear that it's time for a radical change in the pharmaceutical and healthcare supply chain. That's why I'm excited to announce that I am taking on a new role within TraceLink—General Manager of Supply Network Orchestration—as we introduce Multienterprise Information Network Tower (MINT), a groundbreaking new solution that delivers real-time supply chain intelligence through cost-effective integration between pharmaceutical companies, suppliers, contract manufacturers, wholesale distributors, 3PLs, carriers, and more. But before we talk about MINT, let's take a closer look at the critical need for integration in the healthcare and pharmaceutical industries.
Fragmentation creates supply chain blind spots
Today's pharmaceutical industry is fragmented and fraught with many business processes that are manual, inefficient, and executed via phone calls, emails, and spreadsheets. This fragmentation hinders efficiency and creates challenges in terms of communication and collaboration between stakeholders. The result is a lack of visibility that contributes to growing problems like drug shortages, poor demand forecasting, and declining on-time customer delivery performance. According to industry research from The Economist Intelligence Unit, IDC, Procurement Foundry, and others:
- 90% or more of your supply chain resides outside of your four walls.
- 60% of pharma executives are currently being held back by legacy systems and technology infrastructure.
- 54% of pharma executives are struggling with data integration problems resulting from siloed information systems.
- 52% of purchase orders contain errors when they are first sent via traditional methods, and the average purchase order is updated nine times.
To achieve a high-performing supply chain, pharmaceutical and healthcare companies need a faster, better, and more cost-effective way to integrate with both upstream and downstream partners—a new method of integrating that creates a “win-win” value proposition for partners as well.
Integration will lead to a data-driven revolution
Increased levels of trading partner integration will lead to improved communication and collaboration and have an immediate impact in terms of helping to resolve the major business process challenges facing the pharmaceutical supply chain today. But that's just the beginning. The data generated from trading partner integration is going to drive high-value predictive analytics, feed generative AI engines, and deliver game-changing, network-wide intelligence that will transform the pharmaceutical and healthcare industries.
Integrate with 100% of your trade partners with TraceLink MINT
TraceLink MINT is a radical new technology that enables pharmaceutical companies to integrate with trade partners in real time. Why is MINT radical? Because it enables integration at a fraction of the time, cost, and effort of traditional methods such as EDI and point-to-point models. As a result, pharmaceutical, medical device, and healthcare product manufacturers can integrate with more trade partners than ever before.
With just a single connection to the proven TraceLink network of more than 290,000 authenticated and onboarded entities, MINT enables you and 100% of your trade partners to exchange purchase orders, invoices, advance ship notices, production forecasts, and many other common business transactions with full interoperability.
Three industry use cases for MINT
MINT's flexible integration capability enables companies across the supply chain to quickly connect and share information to support a wide range of organizations and use cases. A few examples include:
- A global, Fortune 500 pharmaceutical manufacturer that needs to overcome data incompatibility issues with CMOs to enable real-time visibility and collaboration and improve on-time customer delivery performance.
- CMOs that need more efficient onboarding to support a wide range of customers, from global brand owners that want to integrate with 30 locations in 20 countries through EDI, to small biopharmas commercializing their first products that will email purchase orders infrequently.
- Direct supply management leaders at wholesale distributors that need greater visibility into the quantities and delivery dates of thousands of purchase orders across hundreds to thousands of suppliers.
MINT is poised to transform the entire pharmaceutical and healthcare supply chain—and that's why I'm thrilled to be leading the Supply Network Orchestration team at TraceLink. MINT will enable seamless integration between upstream and downstream trade partners, delivering a collaborative approach that will be essential to fostering transparency, improving communication, and mitigating risks associated with the supply chain. The supply chain is facing many challenges, but TraceLink MINT provides a reason to be excited about the future.
Learn more in our next webinar
I'd like to invite you to learn more about TraceLink MINT by watching our on-demand webinar, "Unlock Real-Time Integration with 100% of Your External Manufacturing Partners: A Simple, Fast, and Cost-Effective Approach." Watch it today to get a firsthand look at how TraceLink MINT helps you boost visibility and collaboration across all of your external manufacturing partners in three easy steps: connect, collaboration, and control.
