Pharma Supply Chain: Identifying and Tackling Opportunities in the

Background

Aptar is a global supplier of a broad range of consumer packaging solutions, working with top brands in over 15 countries. Their innovative solutions serve a variety of end markets including pharmaceutical, beauty, personal care, home, food and beverage.

Aptar’s Pharma division is an industry leader in drug delivery devices, providing drug delivery systems, components and services to pharmaceutical, biotech and consumer healthcare customers worldwide, across the nasal, pulmonary, ophthalmic, dermal and injectable routes of administration.

Brief

Aptar Pharma is operating in a sophisticated and global value chain with various quality control, technical, digital and regulatory needs amongst different players. Producing essential drug delivery and care products requires a highly complex manufacturing process, spread across the world.

Digitisation is bringing important paradigm shifts in numerous industries, such as increasing communication, automation, prediction and personalization. In supply chains, it’s accelerating collaboration, communication and coordination between partners to solve common frictions and achieve mutual goals.

Aptar Pharma’s brief was to help them take their initiatives to the next level, focusing on generating digital propositions to help their customers, suppliers and internal teams.

IMPACT

To generate value in B2B markets with highly-sophisticated operations and many different teams, solving defined problems in an experimentative way is essential. A systems mapping of all moving parts is good at the start, but due to the sheer number of stakeholders involved, it would be difficult for any intrapreneur to define a solution from theory alone.

We devised a remote intrapreneurship programme to provide Aptar Pharma with validated business cases based on insights from customers. The programme focused on achieving 4 objectives:

Bring together a cross-functional programme team to investigate customer problems and needs that a Digital platform is well-suited to solve
Adopt a Lean Entrepreneurial approach to develop a robust evidence-based business case
Define a roadmap and immediate next steps to move forward
Create a baseline of concepts and methods more akin to how entrepreneurs may operate within established organisations

Our team interviewed 10 stakeholders of varying seniority about their perspective on Aptar Pharma’s customer relationships. This helped us collaborate with senior leadership to define the 3 opportunities on which to focus.
We created a bespoke Aptar Pharma Digital Value Creation Hub to support teams along their intrapreneurial journey. The Hub was accessible by teams 24/7, providing key strategic documents, an interactive workspace and a Learning & Development track to help participants attain an essential understanding of key Intrapreneurship fundamentals.
Teams were presented with the three opportunities which senior leadership are strategically aligned on solving, and they defined the underlying customer profile and main frustrations which they believe lay in the path to achieving their customers’ goals.
Teams were guided to conduct Customer Discovery interviews with Aptar’s clients focused on understanding and validating the underlying customer needs.
Generation of ideas that address Innovation Briefs via a rapid “sprint”-style remote workshop involving cross-functional teams.
Formulation of a roadmap and lean business case for testing the propositions in-market via digital experiments with clear responsibilities assigned.
3 teams presented their business cases to senior stakeholders, articulating the opportunity and strategic value of their ideas.

Outcomes

We helped Aptar Pharma obtain 3 validated business cases tackling distinct phases in customers’ product design and development process for the. These are tangible opportunities within the Pharma supply chain that they can allocate resources to developing, clearly seeing the value they will generate, and they are currently being approved by the senior management.

Some of Our Work