Deep Dive

Without robust multi-tier sustainability tracking, pharmaceutical companies face significant risks including reputational damage from unethical labor practices or environmental violations deep within their supply chain, potential disruptions due to unmanaged risks at lower tiers (e.g., natural disasters, geopolitical instability affecting raw material suppliers), and regulatory challenges in meeting increasingly stringent compliance standards around supply chain transparency and due diligence.

This lack of visibility can also lead to increased operational costs due to inefficiencies, difficulty in identifying opportunities for sustainable innovation, and a diminished ability to respond to consumer and investor demands for responsible business practices, ultimately impacting long-term business resilience and market competitiveness.

Comprehensive data integration

Effective data integration is paramount for successful multi-tier sustainability tracking. This requires breaking down data silos and connecting disparate systems across the supply chain, including:

• Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)
• Warehouse Management Systems (WMS)
• Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES)
• Specialized ESG reporting platforms

Key data points include environmental metrics (e.g., carbon emissions, water usage, waste generation), social indicators (e.g., labor practices, human rights, worker safety), and governance information (e.g., ethical sourcing, compliance with anti-corruption policies) from all tiers.

Technologies such as IoT sensors for real-time monitoring, blockchain or third-party clouds for immutable data records and enhanced traceability, and AI-powered analytics for identifying risks and optimizing performance are crucial for collecting, standardizing, and analyzing the vast amounts of data generated across a complex, multi-tiered pharmaceutical supply chain.

Strong supplier collaboration and data-sharing agreements are essential to ensure the accuracy and completeness of information from all participants.

Implementation & Enhancement

Selecting A Solution

When building out and utilizing multi-tier sustainability tracking, it is important to consider:

• Data quality & latency: real-time integration, master-data governance, and streaming ETL/ELT ensuring data is up-to-date.
• Change management: upskilling planners in their usage – start by rolling out Multi-Tier Sustainability Tracking as copilots to humans before relying on them in any autonomous capacity.
• Cybersecurity: ensure the system supports granular permissions and access controls consistent with your business requirements, and any partner access (e.g., via portals) is similarly secure.
• Ongoing maintenance costs: does the solution run in the cloud, or must it be hosted internally/on-premises and maintained manually?
• Open-source: is the sustainability tracking solution open-source, or is there risk of platform/vendor lock-in?
• Incremental adoption: can the solution be used to target specific use-cases initially to prove its value and deliver quick wins (e.g., certain categories of suppliers, or one full product supply chain) before broader roll-out?

Roadmap To Value

A typical multi-tier sustainability tracking solution built on HASH involves the following steps:

1. Baseline & cleanse data: connect key ERPs, supplier portals, IoT feeds, and specify any unstructured data sources of interest. HASH can reliably ingest data from both platforms with APIs, as well as those without (e.g. paywalled ESG analytics websites).
2. Launch visibility layer: real-time event dashboards, basic ML alerts.
3. Add predictive & prescriptive apps: purchasing and supplier contract sustainability insights, prescriptive sustainability recommendations, etc.
4. Continuously learn: reinforce models with new data; driving a culture of decision-intelligence through an "OODA loop".