Remarkable Agility

A quarterly series blog posts about responsible supply chain management from the PSCI Chair, Manjit Singh

The pharmaceutical and healthcare industry is highly regulated and continuously evolving due to public and state attention on global topics like climate change and environmental concerns, antimicrobial resistance, patient safety, and human rights.

To keep pace with the changing world, working in the pharmaceutical and healthcare industry requires many skills and behaviours. And in the last year we at the PSCI have realized that agility might be the most important behavior for success. As we published in our 2020 Annual Report, we surprised even ourselves with what we collectively managed to achieve in promoting responsible supply chain practices for those in the pharmaceutical and healthcare supply chains. And we know this was the direct result of the remarkable agility of our members. 

Firstly, we launched a new strategy designed to deliver our vision for excellence in safety, environmental, and social outcomes across the whole of the global pharmaceutical and healthcare supply chain. Many of our strategic objectives remain the same—being an industry leader, partnering with others, and continuing to drive excellent auditing practices—but we have placed new focus on regionalization in China and India, offering world-leading supplier training, and a commitment to innovation. 

Secondly, we added new and important themes to our Principles. The PSCI Principles are the foundation of all we do. They are our blueprint for responsible practice, setting out our expectations for five relevant topics: ethics, labor, health & safety, environment, and management systems. The Principles were first agreed by the PSCI’s founding members in 2006 and as part of strategy review, we took valuable inputs from stakeholders and our Advisory Panel. They highlighted the growing importance of biodiversity, the need to explicitly emphasize climate change, and the criticality of business resilience. We seek for the PSCI Principles to become the industry standard for responsible supply chain management and we were delighted that they were recently included in the Danish Government’s Climate Partnership Roadmap for the Life Sciences and Biotech sector. You can learn more about the PSCI Principles in this short video. 

Finally, we pivoted our very well-attended supplier conferences in China and India to virtual events, and reached nearly double the number of supplier attendees as a result. Across 51 training sessions over eight days, more than 700 attendees learned about the PSCI Principles, the power of collaboration, and attended expert session on topics including Human Rights & Labor and Industrial Hygiene. Our next round of supplier conferences are taking place in September and we look forward to welcoming even more attendees. 

We at the PSCI pride ourselves on our ability to move quickly when we see an opportunity and work collaboratively towards a common vision for responsible supply chain practices. We know that our industry is built on progress, innovation, and a drive to continually improve. I’m delighted that we are able to bring this same energy to our work to improve our supply chains, despite challenging circumstances. To learn more about the PSCI and our remarkable agility, I’d encourage you to read our 2020 Annual Report.