Efficient supply chain strategies uncovered: lessons from industry leaders at our Gumption Café
Pieter Vissers of Nipro and Ulrich Gafafer of Verfora were guests at our earlier Gumption Café on supply chain efficiency in Ghent. They explained how their companies made the supply chain more efficient.
Pieter Vissers of Nipro and Ulrich Gafafer of Verfora were guests at our earlier Gumption Café on supply chain efficiency in Ghent. They explained how their companies made the supply chain more efficient.
Pieter Vissers is operations director at Nipro Medical Europe, part of Nipro Corporation Japan. The company makes and distributes solutions for kidney care, cardiovascular diseases, diabetes and other conditions. Additionally, Nipro is one of the leading needle manufacturers in the world.
Rapid organic growth and an aggressive mergers and acquisitions strategy had left Nipro Medical Europe navigating a labyrinth of hardware, consumables, and spare parts stock points across the EMEA region. This complexity strained not just customer service standards but also internal operational efficiencies. “It is important that we can keep our promises so that hospitals and patients do not run out of products,” says Pieter Vissers. “Moreover, with the ever-expanding network, we needed more reliable real-time insights to make informed decisions.”
Nipro Medical Europe decided to invest in optimising its supply chain network and supporting processes, which is why it entered into a partnership with valueXstream.
“We started with this question: suppose we were to restart our business from scratch, what would our distribution network in EMEA look like? That starting point led us to new insights”, confirms Pieter. “We focused on the channel strategy, customer segmentation and distribution network. The new approach will make the supply chain more flexible. For example, expanding to other countries or introducing new products will be easier.”
Ulrich Gafafer is the Head of Business Planning and Supply Chain of Verfora. The Swiss pharmaceuticals company is the number one national company in the consumer health products market. Verfora markets drugs, medical devices, food supplements, biocides and beauty products.
Together with Bmatix, it implemented SAP Analytics Cloud. Based on streamlined input from brand managers, Verfora can now accurately predict customer demand for 1,800 products, improving its planning, budgeting and product availability.
Ulrich Gafafer: “Even before Covid, the world was volatile. Covid gave rise to additional challenges that, unfortunately, also led to a drug shortage. That's one of the reasons why we needed a decentralized, fast and easy-to-use forecasting system for our brand managers.”
“Because of various factors - e.g. production capacity issues, missing parts, missing transport capacities, new regulations - lead times sometimes extend to 15 months. The new forecast system, with its planning scope of 36 months, is the basis for the ordering process, and in the end, it also helps to minimize stock-outs.”