Eli Lilly, lean approach and shared models for the sustainability of care

Success stories told by our customers

Italy is, according to the data, a very old country. According to the latest ISTAT report (ISTAT, Italy’s national institute of statistics), there is one child for every 5 elderly people in our country, and the average age is 45 years, 2 years more than in 2011.* This is an increase that certainly cannot go unnoticed, and one that is now at the centre of attention for public administration and companies in the healthcare industry.

During the InTrust Day On Tour event dedicated to the pharma sector, participants identified population ageing and rising healthcare spending as one of the major challenges facing the pharmaceutical sector in the near future. Making care economically sustainable will require adapting the entire supply chain and developing innovative solutions.

The entire supply chain, precisely, rather than placing the responsibility solely on regulatory measures or individual companies. According to experts, however, **shared standards** are still lacking at the base, without which no benefit can be brought to the supply chain, either in terms of supply chain efficiency or in the development of truly innovative solutions. The point, therefore, is not which technologies to use but how to use them, by defining shared models for their use.

With this goal in mind, Eli Lilly, a pharmaceutical multinational founded in 1876 in the USA, launched a project to streamline internal processes in order to adopt an increasingly lean approach. Key words: simplification, optimisation and automation. A goal that is achievable today thanks to technology, but one that must be combined with the effort of collaboration and integration across the entire pharmaceutical supply chain in the search for shared standards.

Eli Lilly Italia, in fact, is one of the companies that have joined the CONDAFNE platform for the compliant exchange of orders and invoices in the healthcare industry, created by Consorzio DAFNE in collaboration with Intesa.

Thanks precisely to this collaboration with Intesa, Eli Lilly has also recently implemented a solution to automatically check the quantities of medicines ordered by wholesalers and, if necessary, adjust those quantities, based on an algorithm built to comply with the quotas set centrally for each AIC code. The confirmed order is then translated into the chosen EDI format and made available to Eli Lilly.

The Eli Lilly project with Intesa is further proof that, in a supply chain as integrated and regulated as that of pharmaceuticals, achieving meaningful results from digital transformation and process improvement requires operating within a “virtuous context” of collaboration and standardisation: only through joint action by all supply chain players will it be possible to achieve concrete results in curbing healthcare spending.

* quotidianosanita.it, Istat. Italia è un Paese “sempre più vecchio”. Pubblicati i dati dell’ultimo censimento (Istat. Italy is an “increasingly old” country. Latest census data published)