A comprehensive program for monitoring raw material supplier quality is a strategic imperative that life sciences companies cannot afford to ignore

By Louis Halvorsen, CTO Northwest Analytics

Increasingly complex supply chains and source globalization in Life Sciences manufacturing has created an environment of uncertainty regarding the quality of incoming materials and the need to monitor these materials more closely. Because vendor-supplied quality checks submitted in the form of C of A always show that the material is within the required specification limits, the goal is to detect when these test results may be faulty, identify unusual and potentially dangerous trends, and reveal when a vendor may have changed their process, source material or manufacturing location. Such due diligence requires constant monitoring and the application of analytics to all appropriate data, yet many Life Sciences companies do not have comprehensive programs for monitoring raw material supplier quality using current-generation analytics and reporting tools.