Supply Chain
Technology Podcast

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

Supply chain, global disruptions, agile supply chain, logistics quality, logistics validation, Vifor Pharma, COVID-19 impact, air freight, sea freight, multi-modal transport, risk management, digitalization, temperature data, quality by design, cost efficiency.

SPEAKERS

Marc Evrard, Scott Mears

Scott Mears  00:07

Welcome to the Supply Chain Tech Podcast with Roambee. Scott Mears here, Global Field Marketing Manager at Roambee and one of the hosts of the Supply Chain Tech Podcast. We thank you for joining us today. In this episode, we speak with Marc Everett. Marc has worked at Vifor Pharma for four and a half years and currently holds two roles, the Logistics Quality Lead and Logistics Validation Manager. Vifor Pharma Group is a global specialty pharmaceuticals company in the treatment areas of iron deficiency, dialysis, nephrology and rare disease. Today, we learn how Vifor Pharma combats global disruptions, and how they are building an agile supply chain to combat future global disruptions. We find out the impacts this is having on the business culture, the surprises along the way and key learnings giving you new ideas and strategies to combat global disruptions impacting your supply chain. Interesting. So me and Marc, we actually met for the first time at the Seventh Supply Chain Innovation Program event, in an event, a great event that was nestled in the hills of Basel, Switzerland. It was in a very remote area, wasn’t it? It was in a and I’d never been to Basel myself. It was in a nice little remote in the hills, and we both presented at that event. And I remember your your presentation especially, and I remember finding very insightful and interesting, and I’m so excited that we now have an opportunity to explore that a lot more and for our viewers to digest that in a bit more detail as well. So I’m really excited we have this chance today. But before we do jump into I do like to add a little icebreaker just before we jump into the meat of the presentation. I would love to know when it comes to your job role or even field of expertise, what do you feel is a common myth that people have with your job or field of expertise.

Marc Evrard  02:04

At least, I became a quality guy in the in the last two years. Before that, I used to be in the in operation field. Of course, the first, the first vision that the people lay from us is that we are a cost and a burden to the operations. So it’s not always so positively viewed, because we are always asking them more. We are, yeah, sometimes they have the feeling we are delaying their work because they you come with the contracts, and they think, no, we go ahead and we say, guys, no, stop. We need to, we need to qualify everything. We need to audit. We need to verify that the process are in place and working. So, yeah, we are viewed a bit like this burden, and we are viewed so like people that are highly theoretical and that they have no real field expertise in general, although I hope it’s not the case.

Scott Mears  03:00

Interesting, so now that’s an interesting insight that people maybe didn’t know a minute ago about your field of expertise. And what I want to do with this, with this podcast, is really jump into specifically about how Vifor Pharma is combating global disruptions. So as we both know, there’s been a plethora of global disruptions as as there is, and especially over the past few years. I mean, just to name a few, COVID 19 drug shortages, the war in Ukraine, and I could carry on for the next 10 minutes, but I would really like to learn in this podcast about how Vifor Pharma is combating these disruptions, or how you’re you’re building your processes to to combat this. So that’s what we’re really going to jump into today. So I would, my first question is, I would love to know, how have you strengthened your foundations and brought in flexibility to combat such a variance of disruptions and a variance of challenges these disruptions bring?

Marc Evrard  04:05

A lot of aspects, but in terms of pure transport and logistics, the first wave of the big impact of the COVID 19 was, of course, the impact on the on the air freight, because most people think that we are shipping everything through cargo flights, etc, but in reality, most of the farmer transport by air freight is using passenger flights. And this, this big disruption, and the total stop of the air freight that we we suffered in in early 20s pushed us to switch a lot of the traffic in the load via safe rate instead of air freight. So that was a first big impact, which which generates a lot of workload in terms of transport validation, risk management, etc. Because these are two total. Different processes, lead times, etc. So in the first phase, that’s that’s what we did, although it was already like started a few, a few years before, slowly, slowly, slowly, for the cold chain, it was not so such a standard to to ship by sea freight because, because of the lead time, but also because of the lack of control that we have at the port of origin and destination. So that was the first phase that we had to create this lane or formalize them very quickly. And then in a later stage, because they were also disruption coming in the sea freight, we had to increase the, let’s say, the flexibility in terms of routings. So we went from, instead of going from port to port with a very fixed destination and origins, we had to create multi port lanes and to widen the flexibility for this kind of operations. On the other end, we have been also working on the winding of the validations for the for the air freight, for the road freight, etc, by, let’s say, going to geographically or global validations when we have sufficiently, sufficient amount of lanes to justify global and let’s say the very the variability of of providers, origin, destination, climate zones and these kind of things. So there also, by doing this exercise of qualifying, let’s say global regional areas or global transport, we offered a much bigger flexibility for the operation, which also, of course, had a big impact on the resilience and potential impact on the on the cost control, because we cannot talk about cost saving in this case, because the prices are going up and still consistently increasing, but at least we are trying to mitigate all these aspects. So what what we wanted also is to simplify or to reduce a bit the workload for all these qualification studies, etc, by, let’s say, switching to these. This really theoretical, IQ, pq, which are the usual methods used for for the validation, and go for a more risk based process of assessing. So very quickly, performing these, these risk assessment, allowing transport and eventually make additional testing afterwards. But we we put really the focus on having constant control of what we do, instead of having, let’s say, this trick validation that are the old styles of of qualifying transport in the pharma industry.

Scott Mears  08:13

Interesting. So, so it seems like you did dive into a lot of research, and you were just saying that you took quite a bit more control on what you were doing as well, and very much keeping an eye on what you were doing, rather than just allow it to move forward as it was already planned, you’re keeping an eye on it a lot more, and there was a lot of research more involved in what you were doing. This is this is interesting, and I want to focus in on two specific things that I know you presented that you just sort of alluded to. There was there was one that you spoke about that you recommended a path to deal with disruption internally was flexibility in logistics networks through multimodal, multi lane or global transport validations and enhanced risk management. I’d love to know how you’ve approached this, and, if not approached yet, how you’re looking to approach this in the future.

Marc Evrard  09:10

So what we are contemplating, of course, is the use of new technologies, but these take a lot of time to implement. So the first step that we had now implemented was, of course, let’s say, manual visibility of the network. So we have created matrices to view exactly all the lanes that we have to track the level of compliance, to track the performance of the lanes, etc. So that’s the basic in a certain way. It’s controlling what we have, and having visibility on our operations, also to track the multiple changes, because we had almost daily changes in the routines, in the transport modes, etc. So we are to be very quick, but still to give to remain with this. A clarity of what we are doing. So what we are approaching for the future is to continue increasing the flexibility, and to do that when we have time or when we have the resources, we try to be a bit more proactive, to provide additional ways of of transporting. So it can be by adding containers to our portfolio of shipping solutions. So typically, we have more and more actors on the market for active containers. For example, most of them is, if really similar performance in transport. So what we want to do there, it’s, it’s really to add some of them in the in our portfolio. So at the moment, the operations need it. They can just pick one or two, ask for a request for quotation, and take the cheapest one, because every, let’s say provider as its preferred lanes is more efficient in terms of of cost for some lanes and and therefore we need, we really need to dig and dig and dig to be the, let’s say, the most cost efficient for the for the full network. And that’s only possible by having more more solutions available for the transport

Scott Mears  11:20

Interesting, and I want to follow up on that question, because it sounds like through these past few years, you’ve really gone to a different level in the in the amount of detail you want to know about your logistics and about the lanes to be very cost efficient and maximize on the efficiency of these lanes. How has that impacted the way you guys work? Because that must be to go from to go to that level of detail. Now, the time involved in this, the technology you’ve got to test, the software you got to I’m sure that there must be quite a few challenges that have you found you’ve had to shift the way you approach these, these problems?

Marc Evrard  12:04

Oh, I think we had the chance, because I’m coming from the operations. So I had a very close relationship, of course, before, when I was doing only a transport qualification, I had already very close relationship with all my colleagues in operations. I was reviewing with them all the SOPs, setting up the processes with the freight forwarders. At the moment, we started to have this huge amount of changes. This is what has some kind of saved us, is that we had always this, this communication, this, I was advising them on how to proceed in to get, let’s say, more efficient processes with the freight forwarders. They were informing me of all the changes so we kept kind of the control like that. It’s really you have a big personal, let’s say impact in the efficiency of the of the process there. Of course, this is not something standard everywhere, and we need to kind of of make it some, some, some kind of automated. So what we are contemplating, of course, is to have an integration of all these change processes through systems that that’s a future for the maintaining Excel sheets and these kind of things. It’s for sure, not the future you see still everywhere that no one achieved to get rid of them fully. But, but there we have the implementation of new technologies is definitely where we where we try to go. There we have started. We have started our our, let’s say, long path three, three years ago. But we need to have multiple solutions set up in order to have a full quality system, let’s say drive driving or driven by operation. So COVID in full collaboration with operation. For that, we need to have multiple platforms. We need to add platforms to gather the information, to gather the temperature data to we need to have our ERPs connected to these platforms. In order to, let’s say, to pour all the product information to confirm the lanes that we are using, where we are shipping, etc, there’s a lot of information there that need to be pulled together. And to do that, we need to have a very strict phasing. So we need to have one by one, every step implemented and for every step, unfortunately, because there are always financial aspects, we need to find benefits, a benefit for the operations, a benefit for the company, or a benefit in terms of compliance or whatsoever. Is what we have achieved now is to have the first platform set up in order to have an automation of the gathering of the temperature data, visibility of the different lanes that we have by having our ERPs connected to these platforms and to make operate, to give, to provide operational benefit by having an automated link between the performance in terms of the thermal performance of lane with the product that has been transported. So we are crossing the data already and automating the assessment of the suitability of the transport. So that’s the first step where that that we’ve achieved for the moment, and we are going in the direction of putting more connectivity, more platforms, in order to have more analytics and the maintenance of all the lanes, the validation status and the total. It’s a integration of the KPIs around the transport performance.

Scott Mears  16:12

Interesting. So it sounds like you’re on a real journey already with your digitalization in Vifor Pharma, and you very much have a full plan ahead of you, knowing that it’s going to involve a lot of systems that need to be integrated and and yes, that is going to take time, and there’s things that need to be learned through that journey. But what really excites me, and you mentioned it, is that ability to to simulate lanes and to be able to now see the success of a lane for a particular product, for particular shipments to go in that lane, for cost efficiencies, and all these different efficiencies for particular lanes that I find, is going to be really exciting in years to come, as more and more companies go through this journey, and it seems like you’re more than the way on, on that journey to to really bring efficiencies and to your to your lanes and your logistics.

Marc Evrard  17:10

We started the journey that’s we have started quite a while ago. Yeah, so we are advanced for, for what we have already, let’s say achieved. Let’s say what we have foreseen for the first phases the second phases, which are, let’s say using advanced technologies. I would say robot automated decisions, artificial intelligence, etc, are still far away, far away, not because they do not exist, far away because, because, actually, most of the providers of this platform, this platform so further, Software as a Service, etc, give capabilities, but no existing qualified plug and play system or solution. So everything need to be designed, need to be qualified, which is extremely cumbersome in the pharma industry. The qualification of the systems is extremely long, and the time usually that it is done, it’s the system is already like obsolete, and that’s what is really delaying a bit the launch of these next phases, because there are huge projects, And unfortunately, you need to focus on very small benefits. It’s not possible to tackle everything at the same time and and the the extent of the effort for the small benefits is sometimes difficult to to justify in a certain way.

Scott Mears  19:00

No, I appreciate this. And it sounds like Excel sheets just aren’t letting us go. Are they? They’re going to make it as hard as Excel. That is interesting. How many people really do adopt Excel still? And I’d love to know we’ve spoken about quite a few different things there. But just what are some key things that have surprised you during this, this shift in the past few years? I know you said you’ve been on your digitalized digitalization journey for quite a while now, which is fantastic to hear. What are some things that have surprised you since you’re jumping on that journey in the past few years?

Marc Evrard  19:39

Oh, let’s say that I have learned a bit about the requirement, and, yeah, it surprised me. Oh, how cumbersome it is to to, let’s say, follow a full project of implementation of something that looks extremely simple. The pharma industry is extremely special. Actually, all the providers are giving these, as I mentioned, very open services, because they know that by nature, all the people in the pharma industry think that they know much better than the experts. So they want to have the service they wanted to have the processes set up as they think is the best. Yeah, they do not trust on the experts or the service provider to tell them what is the ideal service. And now that we need to have this standardization, because we all reach the same level of requirement globally, I would say, unfortunately, the service providers are not able to be backwards and to impose these standards. And I think that’s for the future. One of the thing that we are we need, really from the service providers, is to stop saying yes to every nonsense requirement from the pharma and to come with with standards. Once we come to these standards, we need to have these broaden among the service providers, because that we have, of course, the problem of the standard of the data, typically the temperature information, or this kind of really specific data, is not necessarily compatible from one platform to the other, and also it makes that the content of the information. So, for example, the temperature at this, at this point of the transport at this, let’s say a GPS location is not compatible with another one, meaning which we are not able to use it and to have these new technologies, let’s say aggregating all this information, you know, with additional information that we need to have, let’s say advanced analytics. So these are the, let’s say, the many challenges that I discovered.

Scott Mears  22:18

I really like. That was a really interesting feedback, you actually just said there to service providers about not, not, not actually adapt. It’s not what I thought you were saying. You said that not actually adapting to going back to maybe more traditional ways of doing things, actually setting a standard and standing their ground and correct me if I’ve got this wrong, and setting a standard. So then farms, the farmer comes and meets that standard. Is that right in what you just said there?

Marc Evrard  22:48

Yes, what? What we really miss is this, this ease of of implementation by having real standard protocols, real standard type of data that we can really make as a plug and play, because we have, typically, a very complicated supply chain. We have many companies working together, a company like Vifor any other company in the pharma industry, usually, as for every product, a different supply, supply network, different relationship with different providers and customers. And there we need always to adapt on the special cases. And that cannot continue like that. That’s what is creating all the work for the setup of the supply networks, for the IT implementation of every network. It’s not that you have one network for my for the full distribution, every product, every sometime, every SKU. So every type of this product requires a totally different setup, and it create an extreme complexity that is difficult to cope with, and also create this incredible workload for everyone.

Scott Mears  24:21

You just hit the point. Setting a standard encourages standardization. It encourages that makes that that cumbersome task at the moment. It minimizes that being able to plug, integrate between these many platforms that we need to leverage for our logistics and and that’s why very much encouraging partnerships. And it is something that we do see events which is good to see that lot of service providers are open to partnering up and and working together in integrating their system. So I do hope that we’re on that journey as well as you’re on your digitalization and making it easier for. The farmer industry. I would love to know, if we get, I want to sort of go into the culture of Vifor pharma and understand a bit of the culture on the past few years making all these changes. Do you feel it’s had an impact on the culture of the business, and if no, do you feel like it could have maybe an impact in the future, on the in the business.

Marc Evrard  25:24

Oh, I don’t know if it had an impact on the on the mentalities, because, of course, as I mentioned before, all these changes require a huge workload, so people are still reluctant to change. And that’s that’s a bit normal, and it’s nothing to do with my company or not. So that’s that general. What it does as an impact on the business and more on the regulatory framework, etc, is that we need to accept, to go for a risk based approach. We need to be more flexible. We need to be quicker in what we do, because in the past it was, let’s say, nice to have, and now it has become a requirement. It’s if you, if you are not flexible, then you cannot adapt to the new situation. You are not surviving. And it’s not that the crisis is finished. We are still with the next crisis, and the actually the cost of the transport of the containers, of the of the fuel, etc, makes that the prices of the transport are still exploding in a certain way. So we need to make more efforts to be more efficient in the processes and to find alternative ways that are more cost efficient. Simply, what we want to do from from our sites is to have, I really want from for the logistic quality, for the supply chain quality, to be more efficient. And for that, you need to see it from end to end. So my objective for the future is, is to integrate my part of the business to the ongoing initiatives that we have in terms of quality by design. Quality by design is a total other topic that normally is linked to manufacturing, to regulatory submissions, etc. But I’m trying to integrate our processes, our impact, to this kind of aspect because but for example, we have a lot of relationship with the development. We are starting from the development of the product to try to grant more flexibility in the transport, through more knowledge of the stability of the product, the allowable shipping limits that we, that we call to, to, let’s say, to demonstrate that having a little bit more flexibility in the transport will not impact the quality of the product, and that’s what is allowing us, in a certain way, to to mitigate all this disruption in terms of and that is a huge cost impact in general, and also to have more flexibility in the methods of transport, the type of containers used, etc.

Scott Mears  28:35

That’s interesting. It sounds like you, you just mentioned that you focus in on the design rather because, because I’ve always when I’ve had conversations, very much, there’s been a lot of conversations on track in the multimodal shipments and everything in transport. But you’re actually looking from this, also from our point of before it even hits that transport. How can we modify the design to to improve, to make that easier. I really like that. That’s I like that you’re, you’re, you’re looking at this piece, not just this piece here. That’s quite, quite interesting to see, to see you exploring this. And makes a lot of sense. I guess I’d love to finish off with, of course, there’s, there’s many companies out there that that are facing these same issues. And I would love to just know your what would your advice be to other companies trying to overcome these unforeseen because, as we know, there’s going to be many more disruptions to come in the future, ones that we don’t, we can’t even predict today. And I would love to know what would be your your learning, your piece of advice to these companies to overcome these unforeseen disruptions. I appreciate you can’t predict them either, but, but what be maybe some pieces of advice you would, you would give to these companies.

Marc Evrard  29:56

I mean, sort of advice. It’s It’s logical. Fact that we need to be more proactive. And being proactive is creating this, this flexibility and creating the background, at least from quality side, creating the background for the operation to be able to work with, with more flexibility, like I said before, is creating all the knowledge of the product, centralizing all this knowledge, this data, qualifying assessing alternatives before you need them, so that they are already there. You already have the knowledge of the other modes of transport. For the moment, we are, of course, assessing the train transport and this kind of alternatives barge transport, in order to find space for more volumes, to find eventually cheaper ways of transporting. We are reviewing all our distribution ups to eventually add some up somewhere to mitigate, in case of of regional, regional problem, regional catastrophe, or whatsoever, you need to invest a bit of time on that. So that’s the thing you need also, I think to really adapt your supply chain and your distribution network to to your product and to your company, copying the solution from another one is not helping. I mean, I cannot bring the same type of quality to my company, that, for example, a real biopharma company would be following for real short, short shelf life products, or very sensitive product, or product with very special ranges of temperatures. So here, that’s what, what is my chance, in a certain way, is that we have a range of temperature which is extremely standard, and it allows us to make a lot of standardization in terms of transport processes. It allows us also to take more time to verify that we have wider ranges of temperature out of these so called GDP standards that are, for example, 15-25, that’s always the temperature that we we continue booking, but we have ambient, almost uncontrolled product for some of them, because we have demonstrated through lot of work in terms of stress testing, stability testing, etc, that our product can can cope with this temperature without any quality impact and any risk for the patient. So all the background work is, for me, extremely important,

Scott Mears  32:58

Interesting. A lot of points. The three that I got sent centralized qualifying control. There were some other key ones as well as many others. So I hope everyone’s listening there, because there’s a lot of learning we can get out of this podcast. And why I love doing this podcast, because I learn our viewers learn. It’s really, really interesting. And I want to thank you Marc for coming on today to the podcast. I really appreciate it. It was really interesting to have you on. And I want to also thank everyone who’s watching and joining us today. We hope you enjoyed this podcast episode as much as we have, and I encourage you to follow us on social media at Rome, be on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, your normal social media channels, and of course, remember to subscribe and put the notification bell on if you’re on YouTube, to make sure you never miss out on an interview like this or any other videos we post. Marc, if you would, we just like to do a little last wave. The social media guys love this, so if you wouldn’t mind, we’ll just say a little goodbye with a little wave as well. So thanks everyone. Thanks from me.

Marc Evrard  34:09

Thanks Scott for inviting me. Much appreciated, and speak to you soon.

Scott Mears  34:14

Thank you, Marc, appreciate it. Hi, my name is Scott Mears, and I’m one of the hosts of the Supply Chain Tech Podcast with Roambee. On this podcast we talk to supply chain heroes from around the world about everything, ranging from the disruptions related to supply chains, their personal experiences with tracking technologies, strategies to build resilience, and much, much more. We already have some recommended videos for you to the side of me, and if any of this sounds interesting to you, do subscribe to our Youtube channel and hit the bell icon so you don’t miss another Roambee video. I’ll see you next time.