|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
Life sciences corporations spend a significant portion of their budget establishing and maintaining their external supplier networks. Yet, working with suppliers can often seem like a maze filled with lengthy delays, multiple stakeholders, and manual processes, which often leads to significant research delays.
This is more than just a headache for scientists; it’s also a hurdle for procurement, finance, and legal teams.
As supplier networks expand, so does the complexity of these challenges. “There’s a lot of complexity in how biotech and pharma companies work with their suppliers, even seemingly simple things like transferring data or experiment results,” says Elizabeth Iorns, CEO and cofounder of Science Exchange. “We are at a critical inflection point for many of these pharmaceutical companies.”
Iorns, who holds a PhD in cancer biology, launched Science Exchange in 2011 after having difficulty finding collaborators and suppliers while researching immunology at the University of Miami’s Miller School of Medicine. Science Exchange provides pharmaceutical companies with a single platform that unifies purchasing, supplier management, and payment processing, allowing scientists and procurement teams to purchase products and services, collaborate with suppliers, automate approvals, exchange data, and manage projects, automating all the steps from intake to payment.
In the past, each department had to perform these tasks manually, pulling them from more strategic projects. “What I really wanted to do was eliminate all of the manual steps that you have to do each time you want to work with a supplier,” Iorns says.
To compete in today’s environment, pharmaceutical companies must optimize their business processes and enhance efficiency across the organization. Automating mundane tasks such as guided buying, statement of work (SOW) creation, purchasing, and payment processing is crucial to achieving this.
Science Exchange automates and standardizes these administrative processes to liberate “highly valuable and skilled resources throughout the organization,” the CEO says, which will save teams from “being tied down by manual, repetitive processes.” By leveraging the power of orchestration, pharmaceutical companies can unlock their true potential and drive innovation in the industry.
Currently fifteen of the top twenty-five pharmaceutical companies worldwide use Science Exchange, among them AbbVie, Astellas, Bristol-Meyers Squibb, Gilead Sciences, and Merck. The primary goal of these, and all pharmaceutical companies, is to use the research data generated internally and externally to develop therapeutics for the greater good. However, the challenge lies in being able to transfer large data sets and ensure the secure handling of data by suppliers.
“What I really wanted to do was eliminate all of the manual steps that you have to do each time you want to work with a supplier.”
Elizabeth Iorns
“These data sets are enormous, often tens of terabytes,” Iorns says. “It’s often very hard for them to transfer that data efficiently from suppliers, and more importantly, they need to make sure all the suppliers generating that data meet their information security requirements and maintain those continuously.”
Prior to Science Exchange, most communication between scientists, procurement, and suppliers was via email and attachments.
“That’s not the best way to ensure that everything is compliant and secure. Our SOC 2-certified platform automatically syncs experiment data to our customers’ cloud-based storage,” Iorns says. “Suppliers and buyers set up a single integration once and can share files seamlessly with anyone else on the platform. This allows the transfer of large files quickly and efficiently while protecting against loss or corruption.”
Supplier due diligence and management are crucial aspects of supplier orchestration. Science Exchange’s supplier qualification and risk management process uses the industry’s most comprehensive risk intelligence and assessments to ensure suppliers in its network meet all regulatory compliance requirements for IT security, animal welfare, human biospecimens, and other highrisk purchasing categories.
“It’s important to have real time monitoring of your suppliers,” Iorns explains. “You don’t want to do just a once-a-year assessment that only gives you a snapshot in time; you also want continuous monitoring of regulatory compliance or business sanctions and alerts to notify you if anything changes.”
Orchestration technology is changing life sciences by providing a common platform to integrate the underlying business systems on both the buyer side and the supplier side while automating workflows and giving users a seamless experience.
Moving forward, Iorns plans to find new ways to make it easier for life sciences organizations to work with suppliers, whether that be through system integrations, artificial intelligence, or leveraging the highly structured data that Science Exchange has gathered to educate scientists and researchers on how to collaborate more efficiently with their suppliers—ultimately resulting in new product innovation.
