Californian technology company wants to digitize end-to-end supply chains

14-Jun-2022 - Last updated on 14-Jun-2022 at 13:14 GMT

San Jose, California-based ParkourSC says it has expanded its digital supply chain operations platform to help pharma companies address supply challenges.

Market disruptions such as the Covid-19 pandemic, labor shortages, geopolitical situations, and industrial accidents have led to system-wide product shortages, backed-up ports, costly delays, and more, noted the supplier.

“Within the pharma, health, and life science industries, these supply chain problems have been well-documented. During this time of economic uncertainty, supply chain visibility is no longer enough. Tech leaders are turning to new, automated technology to better plan for unpredictable events and boost operational efficiency,” said the developer.

The US company said its enhanced platform improves resilience by deploying intelligent digital twins for the end-to-end supply chain.

Overcoming data and organizational silos

Digital twins, it continued, help customers overcome data and organizational silos by defining the attributes and relationships across all the entities in the value chain, including companies, suppliers, warehouses, logistics, distribution centers, customers, software systems, locations, sensors, and products. Then, customers automatically monitor supply chain performance by embedding low-code/no-code recipes, AI/ML models, business rules, and key performance indicators and thresholds specific to their business using low-code/no-code workbenches.

“Current market volatilities ratchet up the pressure on lean supply chains to remove barriers and improve resiliency,” said ParkourSC CEO, Mahesh Veerina. “Our real-time supply chain operations platform enables companies to digitize their supply chains, embed intelligence, automate workflows, and optimize operations to increase revenue, reduce operating costs and improve profits.”

In terms of how costly this could be to integrate into a pharma’s company’s operations, the CEO told us the solution deploys quickly and the costs are much lower relative to the cost associated with maintaining legacy systems, which typically run in the high hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not in the millions.

“The costs to deploy vary significantly depending on the customer’s use cases, the number of integrations to systems and sensors, and the IT expertise available to the customer, whether they use in-house technical staff or use contracted staff.”

Previously, Parkour’s platform leveraged IoT to deliver continuous visibility and intelligence into inventory, assets and logistics within the supply chain and it was used by companies delivering COVID-19 vaccines to ensure security, compliance, and quality of their shipments by providing real-time visibility into the location and temperature of the vaccines.

“While visibility remains a key component of our platform, our expanded capabilities moves beyond.

“Digital twin technology is integrated, providing a digitized representation of the entire supply chain – a virtual map of all assets and entities across operations and business processes built from vast amounts of accessible, real-time, ground truth data flowing across connected systems.

“By digitizing and monitoring the end-to-end supply chain, the resulting thread of connected data enables the generation and sharing of deep signal and data intelligence from any entity, system, or device – even those outside of their organization – from containers and pallets right down to individual boxes and vials. This provides our customers with the ability truly understand how well the entire supply chain is performing on a day-to-day basis. This insight allows them to identify and resolve subpar performance or deviations in any aspect of the supply chain, thereby improving resilience.”

Visibility into the ‘last mile’

The technology, he continued, can help with new challenges related to transitioning very expensive specialized therapies from low volume, white-glove products and services to high volume supply chain operations.

“Many biopharmas are acquiring smaller companies that deliver specialized therapies such as cell and gene therapies, for example. ParkourSC can help biopharmas to create a digital representation of the existing supply chain operations and then reliably transition to higher volume operations using digital twins. That is, as they incorporate the production and delivery of cell and gene therapies into their high volume operations, they can carefully map the path using their digital twins and monitor the transition to ensure quality, compliance, assurance, on time delivery, and even gain visibility into the ‘last mile’ to ensure that the therapies are delivered and used as prescribed," he said.

The platform, added Veerina, also offers ‘continuous realignment’ - capabilities that deliver both day-to-day ground truth to planning applications, but also predictive insights into the possible outcomes of a supply chain disruption.

Boosting industry resilience

The pharma industry stands to lose an average of 24% of one year’s EBITDA every ten years due to disruptions, according to data from McKinsey. In contrast, manufacturers that increase resiliency to recover from shocks more quickly can reduce the EBITDA impact of disruptions by 23%, as per those findings, noted the CEO.

“Enabling customers to digitize their supply chains, embed intelligence, automate workflows, and optimize operations improves resiliency and efficiency. Manufacturers know at all times where inventory is, which assets are engaged, and any potential red flags can be identified and triaged in real-time, all of which contribute to reduced operating costs, improved revenue and healthier profits.”