1.2. Drivers in the pharmaceutical industry
1.3. The life-cycle of a pharmaceutical product
2. Components of the pharmaceutical industry
manufacturing and distribution chain
2.1. Primary manufacturing
2.2. Secondary manufacturing
2.3. Operational issues in the pharmaceutical supply chain
2.4. Strategic and design issues in the pharmaceutical
supply chain
3. Overview of some recent work
3.1. Pipeline and development management
3.2. Capacity planning
3.3. Simultaneous development and capacity planning
3.4. Risk in pharmaceutical supply chain infrastructure
decisions
3.5. Process development and plant design
3.6. Production planning and scheduling
3.7. Supply chain simulation and dynamics
4. Future challenges
4.1. Improvements to existing processes and operations
4.2. Improvements to the strategic decision-making
process
4.3. Future scenarios
5. Conclusions
The pharmaceutical supply chain used to be seen as a tool
to supply products to market in an effective way, where the
emphasis was on security of supply. Recent changes in the
operating environment mean that companies are revisiting
the components of their supply chains and identifying ways
of extracting additional benefits from them.
In this sector in particular, the supply chain of interest is
not simply the physical processes of conversion and distribution
of materials. Equally important is the “value-chain”
perspective of managing the innovation and development
processes through to capacity and production planning.
There are still several exciting research challenges in this
value chain, many of which the process engineering/process
systems engineering community are well placed to address