Blog Post
Leading Global Pharmaceutical Company Uses AIMMS to Plan New Product Introductions
Leading Pharmaceutical Company
A pharmaceutical company with a wide portfolio of products across major disease areas needed a way to perform long range capacity planning before executing new product launches. They were using a tool that was not customizable or flexible enough. This prompted an initiative to develop their own tool and try a new and innovative approach to tackle an old problem.
Problem
Once a supply chain in the pharmaceutical industry is established, undergoing change is difficult due to regulation restrictions. Production Directors or Global Supply Directors need to provide a viable launch plan before a new product is introduced. This requires them to perform long range capacity planning for up to 10 years to understand the potential risks and opportunities involved. To achieve this, they need supply chain modeling capabilities. This pharmaceutical company needed to establish capacity requirements for 10 years at each node in the chain, from primary ingredients to warehouses, to packing and distribution. They needed to define the key dependent demand for each node, and model allocation between different sources to simulate various scenarios and understand its impact.
Solution
While looking for a flexible modeling environment that would enable them to perform pre-launch planning without having vast amounts of structured data, the company’s Supply Chain Analytics team found AIMMS. Using AIMMS, a custom solution was developed which allowed the Supply Chain Analytics team to visualize opportunities across the end-to-end supply chain, and manage uncertainty using scenarios to understand the financial and operational impact of their decisions. They are now better prepared to anticipate change and develop optimal contingency plans. In addition to having an interactive planning solution in AIMMS, the team coupled AIMMS’ optimization capabilities with their back-bone SQL server for data gathering and storage, as well as QlikView to share results in their standard dashboard tool.
Results
Thanks to this AIMMS-based solution, the company’s business users are fully capable of planning new product introductions with confidence without the need to rely on IT. Users can view the output right after the model has finished processing in a friendly user interface.
- Quicker turnaround time
- Easier scenario comparison
- More than 10 new brand scenarios delivered successfully
