Supply chains exist in both service and manufacturing organizations, although the complexity of the chain may vary greatly from industry to industry and firm to firm. Unlike commercial manufacturing supplies, services such as clinical supplies planning are very dynamic and can often have last minute changes. Availability of patient kit when patient arrives at investigator site is very important for clinical trial success. This results in overproduction of drug products to take care of last minute change in demand. R&D manufacturing is very expensive and overproduction of patient kits adds significant cost to the total cost of clinical trials. An integrated supply chain can reduce the overproduction of drug products by efficient demand management, planning, and inventory management. Traditionally, marketing, distribution, planning, manufacturing, and the purchasing organizations along the supply chain operated independently.
Management is primarily focused on organizational structuring and the creation of work breakdown structures. This leads construction into a situation where peculiarities appear, causing variability in production operations and a dismissal of the improvement process. Scheduling means that activities are put into logical sequence to understand when each task should start, and the work of managers is to start the tasks as early as possible, in many cases leading to overproduction (a type of waste see also chapter 3), and this in turn leads to uncertainty and unpredictability. Tasks are put under someones (a sub-contractors) responsibility through contracts. But breaking down activities into smaller ones, the basic idea of conventional management, makes the links between tasks weaker. The release of works form one crew to another one is assumed, and the result is an even more unpredictable workflow.
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