Editors' Desk

  1. The Creation Of Shire's Outsourcing Model 5/20/2016

    Approaching $7 billion in annual sales, and fully reliant on outsourcing, no other biopharma today engenders more wonder at its business model than Shire. How does it all fit together? How is it managed? We learn firsthand here.

  2. BioMarin Gives Supplier Scorecards Failing Grades 5/16/2016

    Isaac Young, senior director, supply chain operations, BioMarin Pharmaceutical Inc., gives a lot of today’s CMO/supplier scorecards an “F.” “Stop confusing precision with accuracy,” he says. In this article, he helps us understand how to do better, and provides an example of a scorecard that gets a passing grade.

  3. Trending: Supply Chain Capacity, Value Calculations, And Serialization 5/10/2016

    “Lord knows where this leads over time, but it’s a way of forcing people to think even more strategically about their supply chain,” says Sally, our anonymous supply-chain expert, who also surreptitiously provides some important advice and a unique perspective on three key industry trends.

  4. Amgen's Contagious Relationships Spread Industrywide 5/5/2016

    Amgen is working to spread its supply-chain precepts vertically through the biopharma industry. Rod MacLea is one of those leading the charge. "This knowledge transfer is a big piece we are focusing our efforts on,” he says. “How can we get our industry to look at these ideas and make them mainstream?"

  5. BioMarin Transforms Supplier M&A Into Joint Ventures 4/25/2016

    To navigate supplier and CMO consolidation, Isaac Young, senior director, supply chain operations, BioMarin Pharmaceutical Inc., offers some advice: Approach your outsourcing relationships like joint ventures. “As you have this greater engagement between two companies,” says Young, “you’re likely to enter an interdependent relationship. Why not acknowledge that rather than try to power-play or position one another?”

  6. Amgen Looks To Air And Auto For Advice 4/11/2016

    There are roughly 38,000 components that go into building a commercial airplane; in the automotive industry, it’s about 13,000  to build a car. “That requires just a little bit of coordination,” says Rodney MacLea of Amgen. If companies in those industries effectively manage much larger supply chains, why can’t pharma improve its performance? MacLea and Amgen set out to find out.

  7. 4 Questions From The PDA Annual Meeting 4/8/2016

    A few weeks back I attended the 2016 PDA Annual Meeting held in San Antonio. In general, the main thrust of the conference focused on the technologies and approaches being applied by biopharma manufacturers as they move their therapies from development through commercialization.

  8. Genentech Speaks The Language Of CMOs 3/28/2016

    Todd Mabe, head of External Quality, Biologics Drug Substance for Genentech, knows his company has an inherent advantage when contracting for biologics production capacity. “It’s fair to say we’re a popular customer target,” he explains. But that doesn’t make the selection process a walk in the park. 

  9. Biogen's Outsourcing Trifold For Joint Value Creation 3/22/2016

    Purposeful segmentation, descriptive scorecards and matrixes, and CMO governance, form a trifold of strategic relationship management for Biogen’s supply chain, says Thomas Holmes, senior director for Global External Manufacturing.  

  10. In Outsourcing, Genzyme Sees An Advantage 3/16/2016

    Regarding the outsourcing of biologics manufacturing, Piet Houwen of Sanofi says, “Starting from today, where I’d say the market relationship is sixty percent driven by the sellers, I believe we’ll see a change to a move in the direction of the sponsors.”