As a spin-off enterprise of Novartis, Sandoz aims to become a competitive, global generic pharmaceutical company. Kevin Cook, Sandoz VP of Supply Chain North America, explains that Sandoz is seeking to be an independent entity by the third quarter of 2023 and to get to that point, it needed advanced supply chain planning to match its productivity and delivery goals. The company has been undergoing a digital transformation using RapidResponse from Kinaxis for the past few years. Allen Jacques and Kevin Cook discussed how the planning process is evolving for Sandoz.Key quotes from Cook: “…we look really for efficiencies, productivity opportunities internally on how do we automate our processes better, how do we bring information and analytics to be more of as a DIY application than having to rely on IT…” “And now we're kind of on this journey of how we actually start to link to our suppliers and our customers on a more of an end-to-end basis, and how do we unlock the value of the entire supply chain from us as manufacturers to ultimately our patients and providers. How do we go about that journey of bringing information about our supply into the broader supply chain world, making the supply chain run better, making it more real resilient, more visible, and at a lower cost, while at the same time meeting patient needs in a better way.”“The beauty of a tool at Kinaxis is that it's separated from SAP, we have freedom to basically adjust parameters around capacity and demand and supply chain nodes, and basically run lots of what-if scenarios that are interconnected across all of our nodes.” Other points:Sandoz is focused on understanding who all its digital partners are and what their needs are, and building stronger, connected relationships from end-to -end. Novartis has 17 instances of SAP, whereas Sandoz has one planning solution that sits on top of all of them: RapidResponse. It “helps us communicate and see things on a real-time basis,” says Cook. Sandoz hopes to leverage these newer technologies to further develop its serialization and track-and-trace capabilities, which will open up visibility and new ways to see demand, plan and create better access to its products in the markets.Cook says he would hope to counter any fears that giving a distributor full visibility of its supply chain could risk losing that distributor; rather, he would ideally see it used to build trust by demonstrating reliability and enabling collaboration to see issues earlier than ever to resolve challenges.On the predictive side, Sandoz is using models based on historical data on stock-out trends, financial/economic info in certain markets and more to determine probability of being awarded future tenders. Cook says they are starting to see trends of outages than can be responded to now with inventory builds, and planning.