Supply Chain Management in Pharmaceutical Industry Using IOT

Abstract

The pharmaceuticals industries are in need of recently developed technology to compete with the worldwide market share to avoid counterfeit of pharmaceutical drugs right from warehouse to customers. Internet of Things (IoT) transforms the current pharmaceutical sector by providing and automating pharmaceutical manufacturing process across various sectors such as supply chain management, discovery of drugs, remote patient access and monitoring. Digitization has tremendous potential to help pharmaceuticals industries in addressing various challenges. Major problems the pharmaceutical industries have come across are supply chain management related to poor coordination between clusters, high dependency on human resources, temperature control in facilities, supply chain visibility, etc. Our paper will present the modus operandi in implementing the IoT to overcome the challenges in supply chain of drugs from warehouse to customers with focus on specific applications such as obtaining accurate information about location across the entire supply chain of drugs and to get real-time updates. This provides visibility of all the activities carried out in the supply chain. Also, this avoids counterfeiting of drugs. Counterfeit drugs are increasing nowadays and affects the risk of many lives in a large. Designing a system which provides solutions to these issues has become inevitable. An IoT based Supply chain management helps in addressing the problems faced by Counterfeit drugs. In addition to avoid counterfeit drugs, delivering the pharmaceutical products to customers at the right time, environmental parameters such as temperature and humidity are also monitored throughout the supply chain to avoid spoilage of pharmaceutical products.