DCAT Sharp Sourcing Addresses Procurement Topics

Pharmaceutical/biopharmaceutical companies face an increasingly competitive environment and are seeking ways to create value, reduce costs, and improve operational performance in their manufacturing and supply networks. In turn, suppliers and contract manufacturers must optimize ways to contribute to the evolving needs of their pharmaceutical/biopharmaceutical customers. These issues will be examined at an upcoming educational program, DCAT’s Sharp Sourcing 2014, to be held July 10th at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in New Brunswick, New Jersey.

An important way to improve performance is to gain insight and best practices used by other companies, both within and outside the pharmaceutical industry, to see how they are addressing common concerns of how to create value through sourcing and procurement, mitigate risk in supplier relationships, and cultivate supplier innovation while contributing to the sustainability goals of their companies. To facilitate that understanding and promote a dialogue on these issues, DCAT’s Sharp Sourcing will feature a roundtable discussion of chief procurement officers (CPOs), who will share their insight into the best practices, metrics, and strategies required for realizing the enhanced value proposition required of and procurement organizations and how suppliers can contribute to that goal. Participating in the roundtable are:  Farryn Melton, senior vice-president and chief procurement officer, Global Procurement, Bristol-Myers Squibb Company; Grace Puma Whiteford, senior vice-president and chief procurement officer, PepsiCo, Inc., and Walter Charles, global chief procurement officer, Kellogg's.

As pharmaceutical companies seek to advance corporate strategies and grow shareholder value, there is a stronger management focus on cash and working capital. As the pace and scale of change in the industry escalates, pharmaceutical companies seeking to improve working capital will have to apply strategies to manage outsourcing more effectively, better balance cost, service, and risk in supplier relations, and more fully optimize manufacturing and supply-chain performance. To understand these challenges, Stephen Kunz, executive director with the Transaction Advisory Services Practice and Life Sciences Leader for Working Capital at Ernst & Young LLP, will provide an analysis of working capital performance of the major pharmaceutical companies in 2013, compare it to prior-year performance, and offer related benchmarking data. He will also provide related case-study analysis to provide examples of how sourcing and procurement professionals and their suppliers can collaborate to contribute to the goal of improving working capital performance.

Moreover, sourcing and procurement executives and their suppliers face current and near-term challenges in navigating costs in raw materials and related chemical supply and need to understand the economic and energy considerations that will influence costs. But there are many uncertainties in today’s global economy. How will shale developments affect energy pricing, and how far down the manufacturing value chain will the effect extend? How much “re-shoring”? How is the performance of the broader economy influencing the markets for chemical commodities and downstream products? To better understand these issues, Frederick M. Peterson, PhD, president, Probe Economics LLC, will analyze the energy and economic impacts on chemical supply-demand fundamentals from a US and global perspective and examine the effect on raw materials and related chemical supply.

Source: DCAT