Under the theme of “Navigating the pharma and healthcare supply chain in these unprecedented times”, JAS recently conducted an important webinar to bring its customers and industry partners together to project the way forward.

Over 30 pharma and healthcare companies representing pharmaceuticals, medical devices, diagnostics, and consumers gained practical and non-sugarcoated insights from this JAS webinar. Topics ranged from the current ocean freight situation to various digital topics - especially centered around transparency, visibility, and security.

“I don’t even look at this as a new norm, but maybe we need to pay attention and have renewed focus on supply chain of pharma and healthcare.”, said Jim Fries, CEO Rx-360, keynote speaker for the event.  Jim’s inspirational and encouraging words were the perfect segue to the subsequent panel discussions.  

His key messages were:

• Despite different views on the pharma and healthcare supply chain, we all need to understand that, for patient safety, everyone plays a part like a domino effect.
• Think about where you fit and where others fit into supply chain security and integrity and bring them together.

Moderated by Dina Bunn, VP, Customer Experience Pharma & Healthcare at JAS, the first panel discussion was joined by Hermann Ude, Chairman of the Supervisory Board at Transporean, Saravan Kumar, Co-Founder and CEO at MaxQ, Alexis McCubbin, VP Customer Solutions & Strategic Initiatives EMEA at JAS, and Tom Madzy, CIO at JAS.  

Here are some of the memorable remarks from the panelists:

• Ude: “It’s not carrier or forwarder against shipper or the other way around, but it’s about putting things together and creating value against massive inefficiency.”
• Kumar: “We are starting to see that the barriers are coming down and pharma and healthcare companies want to make sense out of data coming from many different sources.”
• McCubbin: “Through digitalization, you can meet some of those regulations and find manufacturing efficiency to address cost pressure.”
• Madzy: “Data is not siloed by nature, but the use of data is siloed by its nature. We are combating it by putting all data into a central data lake.”

The second panel was on ocean freight, moderated by Frank Cascante, SVP Global Sales Pharma & Healthcare at JAS.  The panelists were Bill Duggan, North American Advisor at Eskesen Advisory, Nico Puttfarken, Manager Reefer Products at Hapag-Lloyd, Unai Gallstegi, Director Trade Management Latin America at JAS, and Jesper Jepsen, Director Ocean Freight Americas at JAS.  

Here are the highlighted comments by the panelists:

• Duggan: “One of the biggest challenges now is that dry container prices went up significantly while the reefer container did not catch up, causing reefers being used as dry containers to meet the demand.”
• Puttfarken: “We are enhancing our transparency capabilities such as creating visibility to show power-off times, etc.”
• Gallstegi: ”What we have seen so far is that some countries like Panama, Uruguay, and Chile have processes to move containers around faster than other countries in the region, which is a good sign.”
• Jepsen: “The big challenge also comes after the container has arrived and getting it delivered with redundancy and backup plans.”