Over the Counter (OTC)

OTC Supply Network and Contract Manufacturing Challenges

The global over-the-counter (OTC) drug market is one of the most challenging to succeed at for any company. Combining elements of the pharmaceutical and fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) industries, OTC manufacturers face numerous business and operational challenges even as the market demand expands. With tens of thousands of medications produced by thousands of manufacturers across the globe, competition is fierce, margins are slim, and product lines are diverse as drugs often have to be locally or regionally tailored. 

While consumer goods manufacturers look to the OTC market for additional growth potential, pharmaceutical and generics companies are seeking to maintain revenue streams by protecting existing OTC product lines and managing the Rx-to-OTC transition as smoothly as possible. To add to these business challenges, OTC firms face a growing regulatory regime and operational complexities driven by sourcing and contract manufacturing operations which now span the globe. You need scale. You need agility. You need predictability. Today.

How TraceLink can help OTC companies

• Improve supply predictability.  Increasing customer demand, growing competitiveness of similar products and lean channel inventories all mandate the delivery of manufactured product on time, on spec and where needed.  With outsourced manufacturing, synchronizing production schedules, supply deliveries, quality reviews and other production processes to ensure smooth predictable supply can be a challenge.
• TraceLink’s Predictable Supply Suite can help by improving visibility and coordination at each step in the production process. Gain insight into current production status, identify potential issues before they threaten schedules and reduce delays along the entire production lifecycle.  

• Reduce operational costs.  Increased material costs, price reduction pressures and intense competition threaten to reduce even today’s tight margins. To maximize operational cost reduction, you need to look everywhere in your internal operations and external supply network for opportunity. This includes operating overhead, on-hand and safety stock inventory and raw material stocks to labor productivity levels.
• TraceLink’s Predictable Supply Suite can help by reducing process delays, eliminating manual work steps and improving accuracy at all points in the production lifecycle. Automate data collection and analysis, lean inventory levels by leveraging accurate supply inventory data and optimize production planning with enhanced metrics on outsourced manufacturing, contract partner and supplier performance. 

• Manage outsourced product and channel complexity. You coordinate with tens to hundreds of API and raw material suppliers, contract manufacturers and packagers. Coordinating orders and production schedules across this supply network is tough, efficient interoperability is virtually impossible. Divergent data requirements, unique business process specifications and a broad range of technical capabilities among partners create barriers everywhere. In response, you need a flexible supply connection and collaboration platform that gets your teams sharing information and streamlining production with partners large and small.
• TraceLink’s Predictable Supply Suite can help by providing a flexible manufacturing collaboration environment that you connect to the people, business processes and information that you need and only when you need it. Without massive overhead and technical complexity, team members can share documents and other information in whatever form they desire. 

• Reduce production and business risk. Missed production schedules, missed quality levels and missed customer orders are often caused by lack of communication, coordination and actionable data, not bad intent. Production data and related artifacts are rarely stored in one form and are rarely accessible to everyone who needs it when they need it. Internal and contract manufacturing production teams often have different views of reality because they are working off of different information. Delays pile up as teams wait for reviews and signoffs.
• TraceLink’s Predictable Supply Suite can help by enabling your internal and contract manufacturing teams to securely keep production documentation and communications in one workspace, easily available to team members. In addition, our built-in visibility and analytics tools that provide proactive insight when current production plans are going wrong, allowing you to intervene before an unanticipated issue becomes a lost sale. 

Next steps

• Try It Yourself.  In minutes, launch a no obligation FREE TRIAL of our Predictable Supply Suite. Create your own Process Link collaborative team workspace, invite and quickly connect to virtual team members, then experience a new world of production visibility and tracking across your contract manufacturing operations!
• Demo Production Tracking.  Request a guided PERSONAL DEMO of our Production Tracking and ProcessLink solutions. On your schedule, one of our team members will take you through our solution.

Explore More

• Discover Production Tracking.  Find out how the TraceLink Production Tracking solution can give you visibility and control throughout the entire contract manufacturing lifecycle. Go Production Tracking
• Experience ProcessLink.  Review TraceLink's innovative approach to connecting you and your internal contract manufacturing teams to your partners both fast and flexibly. Go ProcessLink