World leader in pharmaceuticals streamlines processes and platforms

May 11, 2022

Raising value for all concerned

How can Unison Planning™ create additional value for every stakeholder? Here’s how one world leader in pharmaceuticals is making full use of OMP’s signature solution to deliver exactly that, as part of a major transformative business journey.

End-to-end approach raises the bar

The company’s objective was to streamline business processes, as well as the associated technological platforms, across all the company’s divisions and businesses worldwide. This involved redesigning supply chain planning processes, stepping away from the limiting capabilities of ERP-based planning, and aiming for an outright end-to-end approach to fully connect production processes, demand forecasting, and short- and long-term planning. It’s a particular challenge in life sciences industry, where companies need to make strategic decisions over a 10-year horizon or longer, and where maintaining society’s trust is vital.

Assessing solutions

An assessment revealed that most planning solutions already used in the company would fail to deliver on this end-to-end approach, because they were designed either for a specific function — such as purchasing, manufacturing, or distribution — or to meet a specific strategic, tactical, or operational time horizon. Clunky interfaces would be needed to stitch all this together, and it would still be difficult to avoid the inevitable silo-thinking.

Full scope in a single solution

Faced with this, the company chose OMP’s Unison Planning, a solution which builds on a unified telescopic digital twin and has the entire supply chain and every planning horizon covered. Decisions are automatically propagated between the different planning levels. For example, drug substance volumes coming from the company’s monthly S&OP are now available as constraints at the execution level. Likewise, execution data from every production plant are available as input for the following month’s plans. It’s an effective way to break down the walls between organizational units!

Insight into factors affecting plans

The integrated solution also revolutionizes the decision-making process. Decisions are made much faster, more proactively, and based on a much deeper shared insight into the consequences. Automation is a key ingredient. Simple decisions are made automatically by the system, using mathematical or AI-based solvers to keep an eye on supply chain constraints and KPIs.

Raising value for all concerned

Making better decisions

OMP’s scenario planning capabilities, and the solution’s industry-specific intelligence, represent a huge step forward compared to the company’s legacy system. All of this allows the company to make better strategic, tactical, and operational decisions, and optimize plans with a view to raising value for everyone concerned.

About OMP

OMP helps companies facing complex planning challenges to excel, grow and thrive by offering the best digitized supply chain planning solution on the market.

Its Unison Planning™ concept has a unique approach. It handles all supply chain planning challenges in a unified way. It’s full scope and in-depth. Unison Planning™ synchronizes all planning stages, horizons, functions and roles. From source to deliver, from strategic to operational planning. The unique combination of services and technology boosts collaboration throughout your value chain, from forecasters to schedulers, from business leaders to technology experts.

Unison Planning™ is a cloud-based, out-of-the-box solution for industry-specific challenges. Hundreds of customers in consumer goods, life sciences, chemicals, metals, paper and packaging run it to make the right decisions at the heart of their business. Valued as a thought leader by experts as Gartner, OMP invests one out of every three dollars earned into innovation.