Page 21 - Logistics News - May 2021

LIFE SCIENCE SUPPLY CHAIN

In North America today, says Wegener, 20 percent on behalf of the pharmaceutical giants. “Very few big
of all orders for lab supplies are still placed by blockbusters have been invented within big pharma
phone, and another 20 percent by fax. Buyers must companies,” says Wegener. “It all comes from these
page through huge paper catalogues, and suppliers little labs.”
lag far behind in the development of e-commerce
capabilities. Most don’t even have a presence on the So, think of countless small buyers trying to match
web. their needs with countless suppliers, who still market,
process and fulfil orders manually. And up to now,
“From the supplier perspective, it’s very expensive there’s been little appetite for reform. The problem,
to serve this market,” Wegener says, noting that at says Wegener, is that researchers in the lab, who
least 30 cents out of every dollar of suppliers’ revenue support a high-margin industry, give scant thought
goes into the sales force, and another 5 cents into to product cost. In a survey of 3,600 scientists, that
customer service. And that latter function isn’t what criterion didn’t appear among their top 10 concerns.
an online retail shopper might envision. ‘Customer
service teams’ are mostly call centres that take orders With the arrival of COVID-19, such attitudes
over the phone. are ripe for change. The general public now has a far
higher appreciation for the importance of life science
All of which adds up to big headaches for the research. (Given the historical inefficiencies that
scientists and lab bench researchers whose jobs plague the industry, it’s even more remarkable that
rely on ready access to supplies. Thanks to the the COVID-19 vaccines were brought to market so
inefficiencies of the ordering process, they lose quickly.)
between four to six hours per week just setting up
experiments, according to Wegener. But even with the success of an automated
ordering platform like Zageno, coupled with growing
He sees the dilemma as presenting three big public awareness, there’s still plenty of room for
challenges for the lab scientist looking to purchase improvement. From an end-customer perspective,
product. One is inadequate or even non-existent around 10 percent of the products needed for
search capability. Two is the inability to access neutral COVID-19 research are on back order, Wegener says.
information on product performance. And three is a One of Zageno’s customers, a lab based in the United
lack of transparency in pricing. Kingdom with a few hundred scientists, was on the
verge of shutting down because of long wait times
The complexity of the industry is staggering. for receiving product. Zageno was able to prevent
Zageno’s automated marketplace offers access to more that catastrophe at the last moment by digitally
than 25 million SKUs, Wegener says. Moderna, Inc., relaying an urgent call for product to its thousands of
which manufactures of one of the most successful suppliers, from which it sources directly.
COVID-19 vaccines, relies on more than 3,000
suppliers to build the one product. One can only wonder how much faster a
COVID-19 vaccine might have been developed had the
Given the structure of the biotech industry, the life science supply chain been fully automated a year
fragmented nature of its supply chain is perhaps ago. But Wegener is hopeful about the sector’s future
understandable. Most innovations come from smaller prospects for streamlining the ordering process. L O GI S T I CS NEWS
companies, of which there are thousands in North “COVID-19 has shaken us like an earthquake,”
America alone, often backed by venture capital. They he says. “It has underlined the need for a digital
conduct the lion’s share of research and development transformation of the industry.” •

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