A guide to maintaining momentum in supply chain planning

Tight regulations. Stringent trial designs. Limited clinical shelf lives. These challenges make it hard for supply chain planning teams to keep up with patient needs and meet transformation objectives, such as cutting delivery delays, boosting operational visibility, and preventing revenue leakage. But when teams consider planning a one-time effort, the challenges only increase. Advanced planning and scheduling (APS) initiatives can offer remedies to these problems if adopted correctly.

Integrating APS solutions into workflows can help teams adapt based on real-time inputs from changing scenarios and dynamically coordinate operations across departments with greater precision, agility, and efficiency. But once implemented, these initiatives can lose focus. Why? Teams suffer from change fatigue, lack of clarity on next steps, and poorly defined success metrics. This is where advanced technologies, such as AI (including agentic AI), and deep business and industry expertise make a difference.

We've identified six capabilities (see figure 1) for those already on their APS journeys but have hit a plateau in achieving continuous returns. It's important to note that not all of these capabilities will apply to all businesses. So, it's essential to identify the problem you want to tackle to maintain planning momentum.

Clinical trial planning comes with numerous challenges – from managing drug expiry and stability protocols to complying with regulatory demands. And often, the design of drug discovery trials is rolled out in phases. Now add an off-the-shelf APS solution that needs concerted effort. What do you get? An even more complex planning process.

To create simplicity, integrate clinical trials into your end-to-end planning solution. This provides cross-functional visibility for R&D and supply chain teams, avoids capacity surprises, reduces supply inventory levels by up to 20% after the first year of implementation, and speeds up getting a drug to market by up to 30%.

To get the most out of your clinical supply chain planning:

• Design a unified global data architecture that ties drug products to active pharma ingredients and clinical projects
• Improve global cross-functional visibility of R&D and commercial supply chains with AI-led operations to trigger alerts on drug quality, production bottlenecks, and demand forecasting
• Integrate your clinical supply network – R&D manufacturing sites, commercial manufacturing sites, subcontractors, and clinical demand points – to align material flows, constraints, and jurisdictional requirements

Traditional supplier relationships follow a transactional model, not a two-way partnership. The traditional way suppliers operate can result in inefficient and manual communications, delayed deliveries, and misaligned operating models. And then, there are isolated, disparate performance metrics that lead to missed shared savings opportunities and a supply network operating in silos.

By fostering supply network collaboration, you can integrate planning and enhance supply resilience by slashing your ecosystem's response time to disruptions.

Activate a connected partnership ecosystem by:

• Using a phased approach to align companies, tiered suppliers, third-party logistics companies, distribution centers, and contract manufacturing organizations on vision and business complexity
• Enabling inventory visibility with human-led agentic AI solutions to minimize stockouts, manage distribution, and streamline joint production plans to cut operational delays
• Synchronizing systems such as ERPs, planning platforms, and supplier portals to deliver real-time insights that improve quality control and supply chain performance

Supply chain planners often begin by focusing solely on demand and supply planning, neglecting production scheduling. This oversight can lead to poor inventory management, increased capital costs, and diminished service levels. So, if it's not in your initial transformation plan, scheduling transformation should be high on your agenda. Companies can unlock greater planning value by connecting integrated business planning and sales and operations execution goals.

You can shorten the journey from planning to execution by:

• Envisioning the future state of a target operating model to embed standard operating procedures at the production site
• Improving data management and embedding automation across end-to-end planning software
• Creating process flows and embedding agentic AI to translate rough-cut capacity planning into better resource allocation, operations routing, and scheduling

Access to a huge volume of data doesn't mean you have access to the right insights. Functional silos can create multiple data truths that lead to faulty what-if scenarios and impact planning confidence.

To tie together cross-functional elements of the supply chain, we recommend establishing an end-to-end supply chain control tower powered by AI. It boosts visibility across your entire value chain and creates resilient response pathways, improving supplier on-time, in-full scores, increasing inventory turns, and reducing obsolete inventory and logistics costs.

But remember to:

• Standardize metrics and business processes across all functions – sales, order management, planning, transportation, logistics – and geographies
• Create an alert-driven target operating model with clearly defined ownership

Any new system quickly loses its shine if users don't realize its value. So, you must create an adoption plan with a robust change management strategy that showcases value. Define ownership and involve key stakeholders, partners, and suppliers. Recognize progress to boost your team's morale and performance. And remember to add production support mechanisms and monitor your application's health to reduce ROI risks.

So, start by:

• Drawing up an adoption roadmap with adoption metrics to track
• Creating one place to manage project-related training, communication updates, survey execution, assessments, and knowledge sources

An APS transformation needs teams with expertise in APS tools and knowledge of operational best practices. Retraining your teams to add new skill sets can offer bigger opportunities that can help realize greater value from supply chain planning.

But reskilling takes time. And finding the right talent is hard. And remember tribal knowledge? It's one of the biggest obstacles to pushing organizations to their next levels faster. This is where planning as a service can reduce stress. It can help you scale faster to balance how you run your supply chains and manage changes. But it's important to have the right partners by your side. We do the same by joining forces with Kinaxis, o9, and Blue Yonder to deliver superior planning value for our clients.

Here's how you can harness partnership capabilities:

• Implement a center-of-excellence delivery model as a joint venture with the flexibility to scale up operations
• Build AI-confident teams with specific planning competencies on an as-a-service mode

APS transformation initiatives are capital and resource-intensive exercises – often spanning years. It takes time to see the impact of business-wide change. So, it's not uncommon for supply chain leaders and planning heads to lose sight of the bigger picture without the guiding light of transformation objectives.

You must take stock of capabilities and build them upfront into your planning transformation roadmap and budget. This encourages management buy-in and keeps everyone informed about the next steps so you can improve operations visibility and avoid missing delivery commitments. Whether it's extending APS capabilities or building a change mindset, we see these capabilities as key to delivering a more resilient, responsive supply chain planning transformation.

Pavan Prasad, life sciences supply chain planning leader, and Matthias Leimer, head of life sciences supply chain, have co-authored this article.