Supply Chain
Technology Podcast

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

Supply chain, data integration, EDI, APIs, pharma industry, central information hub, blockchain, data security, third-party logistics, KPIs, data lake, sustainability, collaboration, upskilling, operational challenges.

SPEAKERS

Scott Mears, René Kronenburg

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 René Kronenburg. René is the Supply Chain IT Regional Manager for Europe, the Middle East and Africa at AbbVie. We are always looking for stories in our data, but it is a constant battle to cleanse, get it on time and digest. We discuss how the pharma industry currently integrates with external partners, the cost and time consumption of EDI versus having a central Information Hub all pharma companies and three PLs can connect to and we answer the pressing questions, should you be doing this on your own or in collaboration? And how do we upskill our workforce to enable them to better utilize smarter, more efficient data? Thank you for joining us today, René.

René Kronenburg  01:19

You’re welcome. I love to join, I’m really, I really like to share my story so.

Scott Mears  01:27

Absolutely, and I look forward to learning more about that throughout the episode, and before we do get into that story, I would love to know how you first started off in supply chain. I always like to know a bit more about a guest, personally, before we jump into the questioning, I’d love to know what, what was your first job in supply chain?

René Kronenburg  01:46

Actually, that was when I was working for TNT Express, and I was already in IT there as well. And after that, I actually became, I started more in operation, so running warehouses and transportation. So I was responsible for quite a few warehouses long time ago, so I’ve got it and warehousing experience.

Scott Mears  02:14

All right. Wow. It’s always into and how long ago was that?

René Kronenburg  02:20

That was in 1995. That’s when I started.

Scott Mears  02:25

That interesting fact, that was one year after I was born. So absolutely no, it’s great, great to learn that. And obviously today we’re going to really jump into data integration. It was great to meet you at lodge farm, connect in Switzerland, and to see what you spoke about, I really want to dive into this, because I feel if there’s anything we can agree on in supply chain, I think is we have mountains of data, and this mountains of data, it’s a constant battle to cleanse it, to get it on time and digest the information. So I’m looking forward to really breaking this down and understanding how we can be more strategic with this and within the pharma industry. So first of all, I want to set the scene with understanding how do most pharma companies, at the moment, integrate with external partners today?

René Kronenburg  03:20

I think in general, that is either via EDI or APIs. EDI, obviously is a standard, but there are many standards for EDI, so it’s not as standard as we would love it to be, but that’s how most companies do integrate. So they integrate on their operational data. So really to run a warehousing operation and to run the transportation, distribution, etc, and then we also want to obtain data on those operations to really produce KPIs and make sure that we can monitor what’s happening.

Scott Mears  04:08

Interesting, and going from that where we are today with this, with EDI and the using APIs, what do you feel the challenges that creates?

René Kronenburg  04:19

Well, it’s actually it’s not so much an IT challenge as it is an operational challenge, because the costs of integration are quite high, so the ROI is quite long. And if you then have operations that do not run as smoothly as you like it to be with that long ROI, you are very inflexible. So that’s that’s really one of the biggest challenges. And then obviously, there is a lot of work related to those integrations in. Setting it up and maintaining it as well. And if there is a if there is a glitch, then immediately there is an impact, and you run the risk that you cannot deliver life saving medicines to your patients. And that’s the one thing you don’t want to happen.

Scott Mears  05:19

Absolutely, absolutely. And it’s interesting to hear those challenges that we face of today. And would you, would you say that? Would you say there are any other major challenges pharma were is dealing with at the moment data integration today?

René Kronenburg  05:37

Yeah, obviously, security is always on top of mind, because, yeah, the data that you’re sharing, you don’t want it to be to leak. So any any means of data sharing must be absolutely safe, and the middleware we use for EDI is safe in general, but that means that if you would just share in more simple ways, that the security can become an issue, and you don’t want that, so that holds us back from more simple solutions.

Scott Mears  06:20

Yeah, theft, that, security, sorry, that that is something that comes up a lot, and it’s definitely something we need to be very mindful of, especially within the pharma industry. And I want to understand because that’s very much the challenges where we’re facing today and how we set it up. And even even some companies are still using the spreadsheets, the Excel spreadsheets, that’s still going strong in some some companies. And I want to end on how we overcome these challenges. So you’ve mentioned EDI. It’s time consuming, it’s expensive. How can we become more strategic with how we integrate our data with external partners.

René Kronenburg  07:03

Well, actually it is. It’s not even a lot of very technical solution. It’s actually a very simple solution. What we do today, we have all these peer to peer connections, right? And if you if you look at the total cost of ownership of those peer to peer connections, as I mentioned, that’s quite high. Now, how can we make it simpler? If you look at the fact that all the pharma companies are using in most countries, a lot of the same third party logistics providers. Then it comes to think how efficient is this? So if I walk through a warehouse, any warehouse of any three, pls, I always see at least three or four other pharma companies, but most times, a lot more. So we all work with the same companies. So if we would standardize that data that we share, that would be ideal, but it’s very hard to accomplish that because we don’t have exactly the same products. Serialization methods are different sometimes, and there are other things that that are different. So when come to think of that, we thought, okay, maybe we should actually look at it a little bit different and not connect anymore peer to peer, but connect to an information lab who then will connect to all those three pls. That would make things a lot simpler. So as soon as you connect with one of those three PLs in the country, then it would also be simpler for the other pharma companies to connect with that same three PL, because they already have that connect with that information hub. And the information hub does not only exchange the data, but also does the mapping. So when we connect as as as a or any other pharma company, we connect with with the information hub, and that connection is established, and they can connect to all the different three PLs. So if another pharma company would also connect to the information, immediately they are connected with all the other three PLs. Yeah, so they are then the exchange of data will not be 100% the same, but it will definitely be 80% the same. Because, in fact, if you want to distribute, pick and pack and distribute products, you still talk about a lot of the same data, even if the procedures are different. So this is exactly the context. That we are now are implementing and more pharma companies are looking at this, or are piloting this, or are already implementing it as well. And we all have different strategies about it, but we use the same service provider and through all the blockchain initiatives that we met each other. We we actually also decided to use a blockchain Information Hub, so therefore we also have this secure connection, which was the other challenge we just touched upon.

Scott Mears  10:38

So very much what you’re saying then, because we’re all very much connecting to the same three PLs, is instead of doing that one to one connection, having this central hub that everyone can connect to, and then that central hub does the work of mapping it out correctly for each individual company.

René Kronenburg  10:54

Yeah, correct. So if another pharma company would already be connected to a three PL that I want to connect with, because I think that three PL delivers a better service, or maybe has a better side cyber security program. Because that’s all also very important. We continuously monitor the cyber security of our suppliers, because as soon as they got hacked, get hacked, we also have have a problem with delivering those medicines to our patients. So that could also be a reason that we want to switch quickly for resilience. And if another pharma company already is connected to the information hub, then and and therefore, via this information that is connected to three PL, this three PL is also much easier for us to connect to. And that, that’s the concept.

Scott Mears  11:56

Absolutely, yeah, it very much would make it easier. But I guess two things I’d like to dig into that sort of how they should approach this, and maybe a concern farm companies may have is, is having a central hub of all that information. How you, I mean, you mentioned blockchain. How would you make it secure so every company knew comfortably, my data is going to be safe, because if there’s one hub, all my competitors data is going through, how would we ensure that my data isn’t being seen? And there they are.

René Kronenburg  12:30

One of the instruments, which is part of blockchain solutions, is, is a smartphone direct so the whole governance is arranged by a smart contract, so these are irreversible processes, and that that makes it very reliant. So you can be sure that no data is is mixed up or shared. But in fact, Tipco is doing the same, and so does open text. Yeah, they have the same kind of services, and they also work for all the different companies and pharma companies and banks and you name it. But if, if they would use a blockchain solution, it would be easier and more secure.

Scott Mears  13:21

That’s it. Yeah. I think that is going to deal with a lot of sort of concerns about it. And I think blockchain is something that’s spoken about more and more. But I find when I get into a deep conversation with people, people don’t actually have a great understanding about it. And I just had a good conversation with Chris Moose on this from from IBM, who delved into blockchain a lot, and it was really interesting to learn. So I hope at events, we can push this message forward more so people can really understand, because it is very much. It’s a word that people hear, but don’t think I know that they fully understand. But it is some serious technology that can really push us forward in the industry, right?

René Kronenburg  14:04

Yeah, and, and to your point, I think people want to use it sometimes for the wrong reasons. I think the right reason to use blockchain, like we also are doing in influences in the pharma ledger initiative, is, if you want to collaborate with different companies, right, then blockchain is a very good way to do that, yeah, because of the governance and because of a lot of hard things, and if you just want to use blockchain because you think, Ah, this is a new technology, and would like to implement it for your own company. That doesn’t make any sense. And then if you start using Blockchain and you start collaborating with other companies, then you find out that you can actually collaborate a lot more things. So from the pharma ledger initiative, I actually started collaborating also on this new initiative, where we where we have this single connect with all solution as it is called, where. So we can actually do this together with other pharma companies and look at this together and learn from each other. And that’s the beauty. Also about, about from blockchain.

Scott Mears  15:33

Absolutely, and I’d love to learn as well, is how would you recommend companies go about this? Should they be looking it seems very much a collaboration is needed. And is that a collaboration with the partners, or is that a collaborations, even with one another, with their competitors?

René Kronenburg  15:50

Yeah, well, you can collaborate in many different ways, right? If you just like, there is a blockchain consensus board for pharma companies, and there actually people just present the their use cases, and sometimes they already working on it, or sometimes they are seeking for for other pharma companies to collaborate with. So that is and that’s really helpful. Yeah, so blockchain as a solution that break brought us together, and now we are just looking at, okay, so how can we actually leverage our knowledge? How can we leverage our systems, and how can we leverage the fact that we already are collaborating on different initiatives? And I think that’s that’s also one of the great things about blockchain you want blockchain is team sport, yeah. So you create this team, and we have several teams. We have a pharmaledger team, we have a secret team, we have blockchain consensus board team, and a lot of the same companies are in there, and more and more companies are doing it. So that’s great.

Scott Mears  17:02

Fantastic. So what you’re saying these teams, you mentioned a few there, pharma ledger, they’re very much being the people that are bringing us together to push us forward in this direction, right.

René Kronenburg  17:18

Right? That’s right.

Scott Mears  17:19

Brilliant. Then that’s fantastic. That’s really good. See that it’s already happening, and see that it’s generating that collaboration. Because that can always be a challenge, is to really encourage that collaboration. And now, as we move forward, and we do become better at this, and we do integrate more efficiently, of course, as we know, I mean, it gets said, a lot of cognitive overload of technology, of more data streams, more more solutions. And of course, this will have faster, will have cleaner, will have better data. How, how do you feel? We can up skill and develop our teams to enable them to better utilize and analyze the more efficient and smart data they’ll now be receiving.

René Kronenburg  18:06

Yeah, in fact, I would say that’s not, that’s not the real problem. But I think what how we do it is we connect to our data lake, and we combine the data that we get from our from our suppliers, with other data to enrich it. And then we create all these, these KPIs and different from before, we actually do not ask our suppliers anymore for KPI KPIs, but we actually ask for the source data. So that means that we, if we change the KPI, that we still have the historic data on that, on those topics, so we can actually still do trend analysis. Yeah, because we we can use that historic data to change not only the KPI for tomorrow, but also the KPI in in the past, right? So, yeah, that’s, I think, the most important. And, yeah, it’s not rocket science, but it’s it’s so hard to bring it in practice, because this kind of reporting is normally mostly done via the excels, the CSV files or even on paper, and then people are typing it in, or otherwise transferring it to to an analytics tool, and then reports are created. Now, if you all put it in the data lake and you enrich it with your own data, then you have a lot more insights that you can get from it. So I think that. That’s that is the most important. And therefore you need, of course, your data scientists to understand what warehousing, transportation and everything is about. And of course, the new, the newer topic, sustainability data is also part of it.

Scott Mears  20:20

So that’s interesting to hear. Very much, making sure that it, it goes to the data lake so we can enrich that it’s not been pulled out from mixture of CS fees all around the company, so we can enrich that and make sure that’s cleansed. And we’re all very much. We’re all aligned with what, where, where the company’s going with. We’re all lined with the same data. Yeah, understood it.

René Kronenburg  20:44

Yeah, yeah, correct.

Scott Mears  20:47

Absolutely. And, and you mentioned there about evolving the KPIs. You mentioned about sustainability. How do you feel else it’ll evolve our KPIs through having this more efficient data and smart data?

René Kronenburg  21:04

Well, if you see a KPI is not trending the way you want it to trend, then the first thing you want to do is look at the data and and find out what the root cause is. What is the area of the root causes? At least what you can find out from the data, and then you can actually look at the operation and see why things are being done as they are being done, and you can discuss it with your logistics provider or internally. And depends where you find the challenges are or the opportunities lie, and that can can lead to this continuous improvement cycle. So if it trends down, then you want to know why. But also, if it turns up, you want to know why, because you can learn from it to improve your other processes, right? What am I doing? Right? It’s much more interesting than looking at what am I doing wrong. So that’s what we do.

Scott Mears  22:08

Yeah, having that clarity now on why something’s worked or why it hasn’t worked is very big, yeah, how we can improve upon that or carry on doing that very much. So that’s really good insight. And I think this is really good insight for everyone within not just the pharma industry, but in all industries, to understand how to better manage and integrate their systems with their third parties. Because it’s really important we do this to get more clarity, more visibility of what’s going on, so we can open that hood of the car and really see what engine we’re working with. So it’s really interesting to see us and speak of you today. Absolutely. Thank you so much for coming on to the podcast today, René. Really appreciate it and talking about you of this, and I’m sure it’s going to be really a value to all these industries as well. Thank you very much.

René Kronenburg  23:04

You’re welcome, and I enjoyed it. So thank you too.

Scott Mears  23:08

Thank you very much. We’ll just do a if you just throw your hand up and do a little wave there, a wave to the viewers. Thank you very much, and we’ll see you next time.

René Kronenburg  23:16

Okay, bye, bye.

Scott Mears  23:19

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.