Member Spotlight: Q&A with Accenture Life Sciences

Apr 01, 2022

Every month, MassBio spotlights a member company and the great work they’re doing to advance the life sciences industry and support the patients we serve. In April, we spoke with Carly Guenther, Managing Director and Strategy & Consulting, Supply Chain & Operations, Patient-Centric Supply Chain Lead for Accenture Life Sciences. Her 17+ years of experience working with large multinational companies in supply chain and operations enables her to help clients create more patient-centric, intelligence-led, digital and resilient supply chains. She also devotes her time to mentoring the next generation of supply chain leaders, as well as helping women succeed in the field.

Tell us about your organization, its mission, and current initiatives.

Accenture is a global professional services company with leading capabilities in digital, cloud and security. Combining unmatched experience and specialized skills across more than 40 industries, we offer Strategy and Consulting, Interactive, Technology and Operations services — all powered by the world’s largest network of Advanced Technology and Intelligent Operations centers. Our 674,000 people deliver on the promise of technology and human ingenuity every day, serving clients in more than 120 countries. We embrace the power of change to create value and shared success for our clients, people, shareholders, partners and communities.

How do your organization’s activities help patients now and into the future?

Accenture Life Sciences helps clients make a meaningful impact on patients’ lives through New Science, novel medical technologies and better collaboration.

New Science, the growth engine for the biopharma industry, helped us through the pandemic, but inevitably adds complexity and cost. The industry’s ability to adapt, lead, and thrive has activated a mindset shift from operational efficiency in individual silos, to resiliency through collaboration across silos and innovation at speed. Accenture has the experience to help create future-ready supply chains delivered across three key priorities:

  • Relevant – agile and Patient-centric, addressing demand changes and scientific advances in a cost-effective way
  • Resilient – preparing for, mitigating and responding to disruptions of all scales and constantly adapting to the ever-increasing complexity of New Science
  • Responsible – converting scientific advances to high quality medicines available globally by building sustainable value chains, positively impacting society and the planet while enhancing trust

Our work with life sciences clients helps make a meaningful impact on patients’ lives.  

What do you see as the biggest challenge facing the life sciences industry today?

The Life Sciences industry has made the impossible possible in the pandemic… heroic efforts to accelerate and launch new vaccines and therapies, maintain continuity of supply for life saving medicines and rapidly re-engineer distribution methods to meet patient needs. But these incredible shifts are far from sustainable for Life Sciences organization’s manufacturing and supply chains and continue to distract from the needed focus to support the future needs of patients.

The pivot to New Science demands re-tooling with flexible and resilient manufacturing to meet the needs for more patient-centric supply chains. Talent acquisition, retention & utilization also challenge the current highly manual, high touch support models which do not meet new demands and are not sustainable. Life Sciences organizations need to build and run more resilient, relevant and responsible supply chains to enable them to deliver increasingly complex treatments to patients at scale.

What’s next for your organization / what are you focused on in the coming year?

In a Covid-era world we are focused on helping companies to create more forward-looking, responsive, resilient supply chains that can better respond to market challenges. For example, we are working with clients to:

  • Help stabilize supply chain challenges in their business and design an evergreen resilient supply chain against future disruptions.
  • Define a sustainable model, built around intelligent technologies and processes to rapidly scale high growth organizations or support a pivot to New Science
  • Enable end-to-end supply chains to operate autonomously, creating a forward-looking responsive and resilient supply chain and unleashing talent to focus on high value activities

All of this work is done with the patient at the core, in support of better access to critical medicines, increased personalization of the patient experience, and with patient safety and trust at the core.

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