LogiPharma Europe 2025: Aligning People, Process, and Technology

The first day of LogiPharma Europe carried on with a panel discussion along the “Mastering Temperature-Controlled Operations” track. With a focus on ways to best aligning people, process and technology to meet the temperature-controlled operations demands of your future product pipeline, it featured Scott Clayton, director of supply chain at BioPhorum; Gerhard Eller, senior director of global logistics & trade compliance at Moderna; Linda Schwär, head of life sciences EMEA for Sensitech; Tony Fonk, president and CEO of Spotsee; and Jesper Schmidt, global head of air & ocean transportation at Teva.

When it comes to what it takes to shift one’s mindset to operate differently in a relatively new organization, open-mindedness is essential.

“People know that we have open-minded people who are not stuck in our legacy,” said Eller. “We had to scale up very fast, so we had to use whatever we have in terms of technology. It was not super great. We had to put a lot of risk mitigation actions on it. Sometimes, to pull that back is really hard work. Therefore, it's all about the people who have the willingness and the open mind to also fight against the traditional pharma barriers—it's not against compliance, but bringing the risk mitigation actions into the right level again. On the other hand, it's also a big opportunity. We really have the opportunity to catch up, but really to move one step ahead, because the technology is really not on the level value.”

A trend that has been quite popular is supply chain agility—that ability to adjust as needed, on the fly. As pipelines evolve year over year, it’s critical that the patient remains at the center of those processes.

“The mindset is going from patient back, not manufacturing forward. If you think about all the changes that are happening right now in the industry, they aren't really changes to speak of,” Fonk explained. “It's more about our ability to solve some of the problems that are happening today, starting with the patient. Ship to home is becoming a major driver. In fact, we looked at some data recently that with injectables, the ship-to-home market hopefully, is larger than the vaccine market altogether, in terms of total number of injectables that are actually being shipped to homes. That creates a whole bunch of different challenges.

“If you just start with the patient first, and start working your way all the way back, the innovations and the technology start to emerge themselves. The other is you have this trend— actually more than a trend—a real issue of sustainability. If you want real-time visibility, most solutions start with a battery, which is a sustainability issue. It's a sustainability nightmare, frankly, to have a battery, especially one that can withstand that long of a period. So how do you create battery free visibility? How do you create battery free solutions in order to help your customers see that? The point is, read the tea leaves, understand what's going on in the market, and press the teams to start innovating around those. Unleash the power of the team, give the direction, and all of a sudden, we get some great solutions for our customers.”

Teva Pharmaceuticals, who primarily specializes in generic drugs, has started to move from pure generics to begin significantly expanding into biotech, which is impacting the company’s global logistics strategy. and its zero-tolerance approach?

“Teva is indeed expanding into biotech—that’s part of our growth strategy. That’s nothing new. As a default for Teva, generic is all about ocean, it's cost effective,” explained Schmidt. “Efficiencies are important of course, as well, but if as move more into biotech, you see that we need to focus on different things, so we’re moving more away from ocean freight as our default. You see that air comes more into the picture with our zero tolerance. On our critical products that we don't allow any excursion, damage, or delays on the product, it's more critical to deliver this on time. But of course, we don't want to move away from our background as a generic. That is still a very good option, so that is driving quite some challenges a little deeper into that one.”

Indeed companies’ interest in ocean transport, is supported by technology. Pharma shippers are exploring the switch from air to ocean—while keeping low-temperature shipments andnovel products in mind.

“I think we're in a very special area, like an era of exploring all of this technology within our workforce processes, but we have a lot of challenges at our plate,” said Schwär. We have the balance between cost and speed. We have novel technologies and products coming in. By the next few years, we'll probably have at some point, 50% of biologics in the pipeline which have higher sensitivity, have higher values. What do we do about insurance premiums? What do we do about security? I would say that the best way moving forward is to rely on data.

“In that sense, my recommendation on how to look ahead and explore all that is to take a look at what data you currently have. You probably have more than you would be that you would have envisioned anywhere— you have a validated data platform somewhere that you can leverage to make decisions. Second step is, how do you generate more data? You can optimize the supply chain based on that. The third thing probably is, two years ago, when I was here on stagewith LogiPharma that cool buzzword of AI popped up, and we all wondered what are we going to do with all of that? How is that going into play? Because we hold all the data, but e're not doing a lot, with it currently. But how do we leverage all of that? Just to close up with some of the data, we've seen that $35 billion is currently lost in product due to poor incident management, excursions, events that aren’t being treated in the right way.”

Reference

Clayton S, Eller G, Schwär L, Fonk T, Schmidt J. How can you best align your people, process and technology to meet the temp-controlled operations demands of your future product pipeline? April 8, 2025. LogiPharma Europe 2025. Lyon.