In this case study, Carl Brookes - vice president of Manufacturing & Supply Chain operations at Kindeva Drug Delivery & product commercialisation manager Francis Mackin explore what CDMOs should be doing to prepare for Brexit.
Brexit
Shortly after the 2016 Brexit referendum, it became clear that Brexit’s impact on the pharmaceutical industry would be intricately complex. As the situation unfolded, Kindeva Drug Delivery (then 3M Drug Delivery Systems) acted with a sense of urgency to develop Brexit preparedness plans and ensure continuity of supply for its customers. Planning for Brexit has proven to be an exercise in dynamic project management, navigating uncertainty, and rapid adaptation. It has also proven to be a powerful case study in the leadership and advisory roles that contract development manufacturing organisations (CDMOs) can play in service to their customers.
Deploy scenario planning to position yourself to adapt to all possible outcomes
Brexit planning is a formidable challenge not just because it involves massive change and complexity, but because there have been multiple layers of uncertainty. When a vote of no-confidence in the Theresa May government was tabled in January of 2019, there were at least four feasible outcomes and multiple ways of arriving at each result (Figure 1). While we leveraged internal and external sources to estimate the probability of each outcome occurring, we did not want to merely plan for the most likely outcome. It was important to work with customers to establish playbooks for all feasible outcomes.