The pharma and biotech industries have spent decades optimizing the various pieces of the end-to-end puzzle. From R&D to Supply Chain (SC), and from Production to Quality Control (QC), each planning step in the critical product release pipeline has been refined to deliver the most efficient functional outcome.
In recent years, however, the landscape has started to change: a drive toward patient centricity has shifted focus away from functionally-siloed efficiency – organized vertically within individual departments – toward greater interconnectivity. With it has come a push to prioritise more value-driven organizational ambitions, and departments at all levels are increasingly expected to align with those goals.
As a result, optimizing the connections between departments (rather than simply the work within them) has now become critical – and few connections have more to benefit from such optimization than the one between Supply Chain and Quality Control.
Let’s dig deeper.
Despite how it may look to many, Supply Chain and QC don’t live in separate worlds. Not really.
Every production batch depends on timely QC release and every QC delay becomes a SC disruption. Their functions are intimately and irrevocably linked in a naturally symbiotic relationship.
Yet, due to the legacy of the old way of working, most planning still happens in silos: separate systems, separate timelines, separate priorities. And, below the surface: an infrastructure that supports patchy communication, limited coordination, zero collaboration.
The result?
The truth is that teams want to work in a more joined-up way but the established systems simply weren’t designed for that. It’s not a people problem, it’s a planning problem.
More and more, we hear organizations ask “what if QC and supply chain could plan together?”
It’s a sensible question and the answer isn’t just better alignment: it’s collaborative, more responsive planning that facilitates both smarter, faster and more resilient operations, and an enhanced ability to aggregate value generation across the entire organization.
Ok, so that’s great in principle but does this translate to something tangibly useful for the people working on the ground? Well, based on our experience of successfully connecting SC and QC at major global organizations, here’s what integrated planning actually delivers:
Because, in modern life sciences, agility is no longer simply about moving fast – it’s about moving together.
Across many organizations of all sizes, it remains commonplace for QC teams to be absent from S&OP (Sales and Operations Planning) meetings. This is the case despite the fact that Quality operations can routinely account for up to 55% of E2E lead times and 45% of holding inventory.
Yet what we see is that, when QC is looped-into planning discussions early and often, it shifts from being a bottleneck to being a genuine driver of flow.
Just think about the mutual gains you can deliver when:
One thing we can confirm: the companies that already treat QC and SC as partners in one integrated plan are the same organizations that lead the way in digital transformation today.
In the old world of functionally siloed departments, planning was likewise digitally siloed: team-specific spreadsheets, tacit knowledge held by individual staff members, limited use and incompatible technologies, disconnected off-the-shelf systems.
This legacy approach isn’t just unsustainable, it is simply incompatible with the kind of collaborative planning that delivers deep value and lasting results.
What’s needed is digital transformation that provides:
When QC and supply chain share the same digital space, the result isn’t just operational alignment, it’s business agility – and companies with leadership who drive smart, integrated digital transformation will reap the benefits.
Join us on June 26 for a live demo webinar where we’ll show how connecting the dots between QC and supply planning isn’t just possible. It’s already happening.
This isn’t theory. It’s a real-world, real-time demo of how Binocs™ and Unison Planning™ are working together to break silos and bring truly integrated digital transformation to life sciences planning.
