A hospital order comes in for a product that should be in stock. The warehouse has plenty of it, but most of those lots expire next month and cannot be shipped to that market. Procurement, meanwhile, has bought more of a raw material that now sits idle because the batch plan changed. Each team followed its own plan. The plans never met.
In life sciences, a shortage can mean a patient goes without treatment. Products expire, and you cannot move to a new supplier without qualifying them first. That makes inventory and procurement planning more important here than in most industries, and harder.
Anaplan lets you build one planning model that supply planners, buyers and finance all work in. This article covers what to put in that model and where to start.
Plan stock by lot and expiry date
Most planning tools treat inventory as one number per product and site. In life sciences that number hides the real question, which is how much stock can still be sold, and where.
Bring lot data into the model from your ERP or warehouse system, with the expiry date and the markets each lot is released for. Then work out usable stock for each month ahead, after removing lots that will have expired or will fall below the remaining shelf life a customer or market requires. Plan supply against usable stock. Report the gap between total and usable stock as well, because it shows how much is heading for write-off while there is still time to act.
Set safety stock for each product and site
A single safety stock rule, such as a fixed number of weeks of cover, is easy to run and usually wrong. A product with steady demand and a reliable supplier needs far less buffer than a launch product made from a single-source ingredient.
In Anaplan you can hold the drivers for each product and site: how much demand moves around, how long the supplier takes, how reliable that lead time has been, and how critical the product is to patients. Calculate safety stock from those drivers and let planners override it with a reason. Review the overrides every quarter. If the same products keep getting overridden, fix the drivers.
Plan procurement from the same numbers
Procurement often plans from a forecast that was exported from the demand plan weeks ago. By the time orders go out, the batch plan has moved on.
Put procurement in the same model. Use the bill of materials to turn planned batches into material needs, then net those against stock on hand, open purchase orders and supplier minimums. Buyers see the requirement change as soon as the supply plan changes. Finance sees the spend at the same moment, which makes budget conversations much shorter.
Know your supplier risk before it hits
Many products depend on an active ingredient or a packaging part that comes from one qualified supplier. Qualifying a second source takes time and regulatory work, so it has to be planned long before it is needed.
Keep a supplier list in the model that records, for each material, who supplies it, whether a backup is qualified and what the current lead time is. Then build scenarios. What happens to supply if a key supplier stops shipping for a quarter? What if lead times double? In Anaplan you can copy the plan into a scenario, change those inputs and compare the result with the base plan. That shows which materials need more stock or a second source, and what each choice would cost.
Keep clinical and commercial supply in view
Clinical trial supply and commercial supply often draw on the same materials and the same plants. When they are planned in separate tools, one can quietly take capacity the other was counting on. The clinical team can keep its own detailed plan. Feed its material and capacity needs into the shared model so conflicts show up early.
Get the data right first
A planning model is only as good as the data behind it. Before you build, check that lot and expiry data is reliable, that ERP lead times match what suppliers actually deliver, and that material codes are the same across plants. This work is dull, but a model built on wrong lead times gives confident answers that are wrong. A short check of the real data saves a lot of rework later.
Start with one product family
Pick the product family that causes the most trouble today, perhaps one with frequent write-offs or a fragile supplier. Build usable stock, safety stock and procurement planning for that family first. Run it alongside the current process for a few planning cycles and compare the results. Once planners trust it, add more families and sites.
Our Anaplan practice designs and builds planning models like this one for life sciences teams. If your inventory and procurement plans keep drifting apart, tell us about it and we will suggest where to start.
