Roambee at GIRP Supply Chain Conference
14th-15th March | Radisson Blu Royal Hotel, Dublin, Ireland
GIRP Supply Chain Conference 7th Edition was held 14th – 15th March in the Radisson Blu Royal Hotel, in Dublin Ireland. It was a nice venue with one room where all the speaking and exhibition stands where located. It was a small event, only 100 people over the 2 days.
The event kicked off with an empowering all women’s panel, moderated by Monika Derecque-Pois, Director General at GIRP. Monika moderated the panels and keynotes over the 2 days, her personality brought positivity to the stage.
The first day discussed an array of topics that covered industry regulations, supply chain visibility, medicines shortages, cold chain and ultracold. This was an insightful day, and an interesting behind-the-scenes look of how leading pharmaceutical companies are overcoming their supply chain challenges.
Catherine Cummins, Operations Quality Director at United Drug Ireland, carried out an inspiring talk, taking the audience through how they distributed the COVID-19 vaccine to the whole of Ireland. Catherine explained to us how efficient and careful they had to be when handling the vaccines. When the vaccines arrived too their warehouse, they had to transfer the vaccines from their delivery boxes to large freezers, however as soon as they opened the freezer and took out the vaccines from the box, they only had 15 seconds to put all the vaccines into the freezer to prevent spoilage. I will also never forget the efforts they had to go to, to distribute vaccines to remote islands, they would sometimes take less than 100 vaccines by helicopter to remote island populations.
It was clear on the second day most of the keynotes were sponsored presentations. This made the second day less engaging, which was seen in the number of attendees walking out through the day, leaving very few people at the end.
This event had a heavy focus on industry regulations and standards, this sort of content does not engage our decision makers, instead it engaged an array of job roles. Therefore, for us to attend in the future the content and audience would need to be much more focused.