Facilitating the On-Time Delivery Process

PC: Could you describe the SO&P process that could help with in on-time deliveries?

Jain: The supply chain process for the companies, known as the S&OP process, or sales and operations planning for the pharmaceutical companies, happens in mostly four big categories. There is order management and planning, which includes the sales order and PO management (like the free trade procurement and contract management), and then there’s the actual planning of what will go via which route through which carriers, and matching their production schedules with the carrier schedules. So I would say the first part is the order management and planning that happens. Then in the supply chain comes a very big part of pre-shipment management, which includes, pre-shipment documents creation, ensuring that you are filing the right documents and customs, you are filing with regulatory authorities, you are getting the right filing in the light licenses, so that you get the incentives for exports and imports. Then would come the shipment management part, which was actually ensuring the tracking of the shipment and visibility on what's happening to each of the shipments across your thousands of shipments. At any time, there would be delayed. You want to be able to manage by exceptions, and know about those shipments, those 20, 30, 50 shipments which are actually delayed, so that you can actually start working on those shipments. For shipments going on time, you don't need to manage them. They'll reach on time.

Then, in terms of providing the visibility to the end customers and other stakeholders, there are finance teams involved. There is the transportation that the destination involved, visibility into those end customers, and internal and external customers to tell them about the delays and the tracking of the shipments. This becomes the third important bucket of it. The fourth comes the post-shipment part, which is duty and compliance management, along with the audit and the payment of freight and transportation invoices. These are the processes which the companies would generally follow to ensure that their entire logistics and planning happen on time for deliveries.

This are the one kind of SOPs that the companies need to ensure, and most of the companies are following this. These parts, however, they are happening in silos. Many companies are not able to get one single system to manage all of them together in one place, which is required because each step is not independent of the other. They are all connected, and most of the companies do not have their ERPs like SAP or Oracle, who can solve this for them. SAP and Oracle are able to solve their part very well, but companies actually take this to their emails and spreadsheets, are there solving them individually. It becomes very hard for them to actually track it together with the other stakeholders and ensure that it happens on time, which is why there's a lot of inefficiency in the process.