Enabling and Optimizing Logistics and Commerce Orchestration with MINT and Opus

Henry Ames: Welcome. My name is Henry Ames, and as I've said before the last two days, I'm responsible for our logistics orchestration here at TraceLink, and I'm really happy that you all are here. Thank you for staying towards the end. Really appreciate your participation today.

Over the last few days, we've really talked to some key industry experts looking at the storage, handling, and distribution of medicinal products. We've looked at some complexities around cell and gene therapy. We've looked at AI and a number of other topics that are of great importance to all of us.

You've also heard from Shabbir in yesterday's opening session. I don't know if you noticed it, even though I don't know Shabbir, haven't known him for all that long, I could tell that he was incredibly excited because yesterday's announcement was the culmination of roughly 20 years of hard work, his hard work, across the entire TraceLink organization.

So today, what we're going to talk about is we're going to delve a little bit deeper into MINT. We're going to move away from the subject matter expertise and the unique characteristics of the pharmaceutical supply chain, and we're going to talk about how MINT can help what we call the logistics orchestration.

So what do I mean when I say logistics orchestration? When I say logistics orchestration, it's really almost anything to do with the flow of goods into or out of essentially a 3PL. So when you think about that, it could be product staged by 3PL that gets moved into a manufacturing process in a just-in-time environment.

It could be coming into a contract manufacturer, actually, the branded drug manufacturer. It could be product movement of finished goods from a drug manufacturer into a 3PL where that product is warehoused, stored, and then pick, pack, shipped downstream to a pharmacy, a hospital, a clinic, or may even to an IDN, an actual pharmacy network.

So we're really talking about the movement of goods and the flow of information that accompanies those goods as it moves through the supply chain from that logistics orchestration, and we're going to delve into that a little bit deeper.

My colleague, Tereance Puryear, is our solutions consultant here, and he knows the MINT solution inside and out. We have a number of solution engineers, and they're all very good, but I happen to really enjoy working with Tereance. He was actually one of the key individuals that helped me when I first came on board.

So I'm going to set it up, and then I'm going to turn it over to Tereance, and we'll obviously be open for questions. We don't need to wait till the end. So if you have questions along the way, we've got a smaller group for this session, so feel free to raise your hand, feel free to interact if you have questions along the way.

As I said, logistics orchestration defined, I've already done that a little bit, but again, it's the flow of information around the movement of goods either into or out of a logistics service provider.

We're going to share why digitalize, what are the opportunities for improvement when we're talking about digitalizing the flow of communication between the logistics service provider and their supply chain partners. We're going to share a little bit about what we've heard from customers, and we've learned quite a bit over the last number of years.

Then, of course, the big reveal is going to be Tereance. So it's important to take just maybe one step back. When we think about the drug manufacturing process, obviously, the drug manufacturers are the center of this image, but that doesn't mean that we always think about just the drug manufacturer, and we'll come back to this because looking at any orchestration from both perspectives is really important.

As we're talking about MINT, we're talking about individuals joining a multienterprise supply chain collaboration platform. You've got to really think about and understand the value proposition from both sides of the orchestration. It can't just work for only one side of the orchestration. There has to be value for both entities that are willing to communicate and connect digitally on that network, but for today, we're going to focus on this logistics orchestration at the bottom.

Before I do that, I want to just point out that when we think about MINT and the opportunities to drive value with MINT, we don't just think about the logistics orchestration, we think about upstream in our supply chain, so that could be raw materials, excipients, APIs coming into the manufacturing process.

It could be critical components of a quality management system, meaning specialty packaging coming into that process. It could be critical components coming into the manufacturing process that are used in the shipping and the distribution or even things like syringes or prefabricated components that are required for the further distribution of that material.

We also look downstream. So downstream looking at the flow of information, the flow of goods from the manufacturer to the logistics service provider, to the pharmacy, to the hospital, to the clinic, maybe to a contract packager. So really upstream and downstream, and we also cover both clinical and commercial operations. So that's another important element.

Tereance Puryear: If I can add to that, when you think about the word orchestration we use, while we position MINT, obviously, as a software solution for the industry, orchestration includes your collaboration with your partners as well.

So to Henry's point, if you aren't conscious of where your role in the supply chain falls relative to those before you and after you, you impact how fast or slow or optimal or inefficient the supply chain moves. So when we implement this, we think about what happens before this step, what happens after. Have you thought about time constraints, time fences?

Real time data is key, but also that the processes align with the implementation that you're doing today. So something to think about as you bring it all together for true orchestration.

Henry: Thank you, Tereance. I think we can all agree that the pharmaceutical supply chain is sufficiently complex, and we've heard from a number of speakers over the last two days on this very topic.

Monica [indecipherable] talked about regulatory compliance in origin and destination countries, and that needs to be taken into consideration. That can vary quite greatly. She talked about distribution models that varied within even here in Europe from even countries that share borders. Those systems can be very, very different.

We've talked about outsourcing activities and this trend towards outsourcing services to other providers that then create essentially a lack of visibility, create a need for that digital connectivity to ensure the flow of information around the movement of goods so that you can help provide that supply chain visibility.

Some of the common questions we hear from customers are, "Has my supplier accepted the PO in full?" "Is my order ready to ship?" "Is my batch quality released?" "What's the real time forecasted demand?" "Where is my shipment?" All of these questions are very common questions that we hear from customers that are involved in that logistics orchestration.

So how do we see customers solving those problems today? Well, today they are often throwing more people at it which obviously is not efficient, not cost effective at all.

Sometimes we see logistics providers developing portals and many of these 3PLs have invested heavily in these portals, and they're actually quite good. There's a lot of really good, rich data in these these portals, and in many cases, there's opportunities to drive reporting and analytics.

The problem is if you're a drug manufacturer and you're working across multiple logistics service providers, do I go to this LSP's portal to pull down this information for this geographic market and then this, another portal to pull on this information for this particular product category or this geography?

So it's not really efficient for the ultimate customer, and that's one of the elements where we see MINT providing great value for 3PL to provide a more harmonized solution in terms of visibility for the customer.

Of course, as we pointed out and Shabbir made very clear, is point-to-point integration, they're just hugely expensive, time consuming, and just simply not efficient at all.

Now I know this is coming up. I think Paul might have this in the next deck, so I won't belabor the point, but in essence, TraceLink, this sort of green sickle shape in the middle, that's what we talked about yesterday.

That was essentially the Rosetta Stone, the sort of the ability to come as you are, enabling a trading partner to come to the transaction with whatever type of information format they want, allowing TraceLink to serve as the translation technology that converts that data into whatever format your trading partner would like to receive it in and facilitate that collaboration, and that collaboration could be system to system, could be system to person, or person to person.

So, again, talking about democratizing the supply chain, enabling any level of technical prowess to participate on the network.

Tereance: To emphasize one point on here too is that what Henry just mentioned, a lot of companies, what they do is they'll invest into a data lake technology, and hire this room of IT professionals.

All those service providers and those customers say, "Hey. Well, connect here, connect here." Now we're synthesizing data in a data lake to now invest in a BI tool to service the data. So you're adding a new suite of employees or vertical, if you will, to your pharma company. Is that what you want to do? Is that the direction you want to go?

I think that's a question we should ask internally from a strategy perspective is, do we want to become an IT company, or do you want to focus on the pharma strategy that we are a business that we created initially? What do we want to do with that?

I would argue that people would agree we don't want to become an IT full house, full scale shop. Maybe support our internal processes, but that connectivity requires you now, if you want all that data, you have to go get it yourself, and it's challenging, time consuming as it's illustrated in the last slide.

Audience Member: Can I ask you a question?

Henry: Sure.

Audience Member: When you're sitting there looking at this system in terms of cost of data storage, you being just slowly being introduced to this platform, could you make the argument that there's less cost of housing data with these types of integrations rather than going to a data lake?

Tereance: Oh, for sure. You have to have an administrator, or you pay for someone's file service. One or the other, right? That's why you do your assessment. You do your RFP, RFx, and your RF processes, but it's either have in-house resources to manage it and you buy your own data space or use a third-party cloud software.

I guarantee you if it's just storing data, I think Bert can speak to more than I can, but that's going to be costly because that's the business they're in is storing data. So their model to make money is to store the data.

I think we're kind of in between. We're not trying to do one or the other, but we're supporting the pharma industry with the data that you already transact with us. Again, if you want to become an IT shop, invest heavily into that, but weigh that investment now against the alternative.

Henry: While TraceLink has developed arguably the most comprehensive multienterprise supply chain collaboration platform on the planet today with over 300,000 participants on the network trading transactional data today specific to DSCSA and EUFND and all of the other track and trace and serialization pedigree related data, we've expanded those transaction types as was described, and Tereance is going to get into that later, specifically the transaction types for the 3PL orchestration.

So what are the benefits to the orchestration? We've talked about some of them before, so I won't belabor the point on this particular slide, but it's real time inventory management. It's enabling a 3PL to provide order-to-cash services.

This is important when the 3PL is actually looking to expand services, provide a higher level of of granularity of customer service to the drug manufacturer and be able to share that information in a timely manner, and of course, receiving optimization for customers. "Has my shipment been shipped?" "When can I expect to receive that shipment," and, "How do I have visibility around the movement of goods?"

The next two slides are quite simple, but in essence, this is your fulfillment orchestration. I always like to think of it from the customer's perspective. In this particular slide, we have the customer on the right hand side. Of course, they're submitting a purchase order to the organization. That information goes to the 3PL.

You've got a warehouse transfer, warehouse stock, transfer shipping advice, then the receiving advice, the warehouse shipping order, shipping advice, and and so forth. So this is the flow of information around a traditional fulfillment process.

In this particular example, this is where the 3PL is actually managing the order to cash. In this case, you've got the 3PL in the middle with the customer on the left hand side and the same type of transactions are occurring here between the 3PL and the customer, but on the right hand side, you've got the 3PL sending the purchase order info, the advance ship notice info, invoice info.

So that information is flowing back to the manufacturer to give them visibility on the performance and the activities being performed by their third party, by their outsourced third party, enabling the drug manufacturer to know exactly what's happening with regards to the flow of information, and much of this information either isn't flowing today or is flowing in a very manual process.

So with that, I will turn it over to my colleague, Tereance.

Tereance: So in the interest of time, I want to go through this. This is a newly released development. I give my disclaimer. I see some people laughing. I want to say our engineers are actively working to deploy enhancements to the solution, so I'm going to jump in here, and I may have to log in and log out because we do have high security in this platform. After a certain amount of time, it will kick you out of the system so that no one drifts by your laptop and starts pecking on it.

This is the login to the Opus web platform screen, and what I'm going to do...We have Zoom popping up now, Craig.

What I'm going to do is walk through a few of the themes that you've heard across the past few days around the network concept, how we can easily add members to a network, create the network, link you to those partners, and then I walk through, to Henry's point, a few of the logistics-related transaction screens, and I'll show reporter dashboard too. Again, keep your mind open. This is the possibilities of as you go through having all your data in one platform.

In the Administration screen, I like to say I don't expect users to live in this area. If you have a business systems analyst, someone who loves technology, they can manage this. You do not need a C# or Java programming background to do anything in this solution, but in the admin screen, I'm able to view all the applications I have loaded.

We're going to look at primarily MINT. I'm going to run Apply here. It's going to show me the replication of what was below. Given time, it goes quickly. Let's refresh this. Let's see if it wants me to log back in. OK.

So we can look and see that if I focus on my multienterprise information network tower, I have these built in my network. I have a sort of manufacturing network and logistics. We have our demo, and we have distributors.

So keep in mind of your business scale and who you work with, all those personas can have their own individual network. It can be done by product vertical, regional location. It's your playpen to develop what you'd like, and it's very easy to now create a new network.

You've acquired a new piece of business, or you're starting up a new piece of business. Choose the application, which is MINT. You name the network what you choose to, and you hit Add. You created a new network just that quickly in your MINT instance.

I'm not going to go through the full steps in the interest of time, but let's say we created one as a fifth one here, you can now actively work inside that network to add links. Links are essentially you connecting your network to the partners you want to exchange data with.

So as Henry mentioned, we've built a massive network of partners, trade partners, licensees of the actual solution. So if I go in, I'm going to pick on my logistics space here. I'm going to hit Apply. It's going to show me all the entities that I work with today.

I've gone out. Sales team's done a great job. They found some new business for us, and we want to add a new partner. Add Links gives us a quick, very simple way to add a new partner to my logistics network. I can do a simple type ahead if I'd like, but these are ideally companies on the network that we would deploy in the production instance.

We're going to choose, let's say, Nexus Med 86. I hit Next. Again, I won't go through the whole orchestration, but in here, I can now choose and add the roles and responsibilities for the users for that partner network I'm adding on here.

So if they've never been on the solution, they'll go through this process, but if they're already active on the solution, it's a shorter process. So imagine that.

The admin person can actually manage users as well. I won't go through the full orchestration, but this is where that admin person can save for the logistics orchestration or any other one on the network.

I have a ton of users. This is your admin space. This is as far as you really need to go because our network success team supports all the mapping and changes and additions for all the transactions that you choose to exchange between partners.

Now you can engage with them, of course, to do custom mapping if you do it additions and changes to your purchase order, your warehouse stock transfer transactions, but I would argue to say this is as much you may need to do inside the platform unless you want to be a power user, which is everyone I think likes to be.

If I go into logistics quickly, the business transaction screen, this is a screen again where the business analyst type role could play. This is where you see all your transactions going to and fro between all your partners. This is purely the space where I see two clean use cases. Systems wise, "Are the transactions flowing as expected? Did I make a change in my SAP instance that threw an error inside MINT. Did it go to and fro?"

The other side is for the partner, they can come to the screen if they like and download the transaction to upload to some black box solution they may have.

So remember we mentioned system to person is that concept of you may have a solution in place that's not integratable. You may not want to invest in integration because you're doing an upgrade in some time in the near future. You can still be half of the equation to support the digital exchange of data by using the platform this way.

So this gives you the traditional notes around the data packet, if you will, of the transaction as it came to and fro. So, again, if you have an in-house IT team, they can have one person monitoring this to make sure their external gateway from SAP or what have you is going cleanly into MINT. They can then interact with our team. So it doesn't take an army. It can take one or two people to just flow through the system.

Audience Member: Do you have alerting and notifications out of this yet or something that can flag failure in the data?

Tereance: Yes. Alerts and notifications will come through the platform. We also have business rules that can apply for certain use cases that you may want to explore. Go to those users applicable, and the notification bell's up here.
Audience Member: Perfect.

Tereance: So, we've got some new stuff in there today, four hours ago. So it'll give that information as well, and those notifications can flow to the email of the users who are working in that space.

Then going into logistics itself, what you'll see here, these are the transactions we've loaded just for the demo environment, balances, updates, ship orders, ship advices, the transfers, and receiving advices against those. So as we mentioned in some of the sessions, all these transactions will have a UI associated with them.

I'm going to go into inventory balances and just take a peek at what transactions are here. So we've got just a sample set of inventory balances. We can see who reported it in, the reporting company's actual title name, and I'm going to go into just one to click through it. Let's give you a peek into it.

So imagine, again, you have your warehouse management system in place or your partner does. You have your ERP system in place or your partner does. Unless you have a magical tool, you're not looking at the same data in the same way. That's the canonical model Henry mentioned.

We take that data and pass it through in whatever format, from SAP to Oracle, we translate it. Once we surface it, though, it's going in the state that you request, and I think we do a bit of customization to allow title name changes inside the UI, but essentially, it's your data being viewed between you and that partner.

So imagine in a world where you have different verbiage, different SLAs, each partner can have an experience to an extent as you curate the networks and build those out, and we can help talk you through that orchestration.

As we go down, we can see the actual states of the inventory balance itself. This is in send mode, its been sent. We can go down and view the transaction information, inventory balance information, reporting client, but then we also get to the line items. We get to the actual data.

There's a consistency when we have a conversation. We can hop on a Zoom or Webex or talk about it, but it normalizes the data in a screen where you can share and discuss it.

Again, in perfect world, system to system, this has already flown over to the partner system, but we can talk about it here, and the data's housed here. Shabbir and others have talked a lot about our reporting analytics capability and our future of AI and email. This is the foundation of it.

You saw the processing of the transactions. We're surfacing the data in UIs, and I'll click on a couple more. I think we have some shipping orders in here. We'll see. There's one or two we got loaded this morning.

So I'll pop into a shipping order. I've instructed my 3PL to ship some product down to an end customer. I want to view details of that transaction. We parse that information out. You've got inco-terms. Payment methods are pulled over in here.

One of my favorite ones was that did we get the shipping location right, which we get wrong a lot, somehow we fat-finger key it in, client provider, who's actually doing the transportation move for me, on behalf of, ship-to location, bill-to location information, and then we've got the line item that's populated here.

We can populate expiry dates, quantity order, unit of measure, so that all the information flow in here depending on what's in the transaction.

What's also interesting is we have some rules around some of the data, but in some spaces, every partner may not have access to all the data you want, but we'll populate as much as we can as we get the normal, the default data loaded. So it's still, again, you're getting more data than you were before at the request of an email, and it's closer to real time than you can imagine prior to.

Henry: Tereance, sorry to interrupt, but I spoke to someone during FutureLink over the last few days, and they told me that it's hugely painful for them because they don't have visibility on inbound product that they've ordered, inbound material that they've ordered. They call it a "vendor present" when it arrives on the shipping dock. They honestly don't know what's inside the box until they open it.

Tereance: Yep, and to Henry's point, this orchestration kind of flows in that direction. Your warehouse teams, your inbound, outbound teams know how to manage the work physically. Now they have a dashboard that brings in all the transactions, all the shipments inbound and outbound will be digitized in a platform from all the providers.

I'm a pop into reports and dashboards because this is a really cool one. Oh, I forgot one important piece. In the case where we do not have a system, we're going to use a person interaction, manual interaction, this new button, edit button, and if it's time I'll create one, I can create shipping order details.

Again, I don't think we - and Paul's in the back here -- I don't think we're looking to replace execution of an ERP or WMS or TMS. However, in cases today where we see there's an ability to give you 10 percent of what a solution can do to get the partner the digital data, it's inside the solution today.

So they can create shipping orders, create ASNs, create POs and PO acts inside the solution to, again, meet the partner need while they may source an actual execution system. So all the transaction experiences have a new and an edit of the actual current transaction.

Reports and dashboards, so you can curate reports and dashboards. We have a few team members. Oh, question.

Audience Member: I know it may not be a popular question, but can you download information from these tables?

Tereance: Yes. So that's where the reports piece comes in. You build your own reports, and you can download data from those reports and throw it into your Power BI or use an external process to analyze data. The data is yours, which I like to say, "It's your data," but the reports and dashboard, which is a really cool feature...I'll go into the dashboard quickly, and I'll pull up the report and how it looks.

When I click this and let's just say I have SLAs and metrics and things that matter to me as the warehouse shipping manager versus the procurement manager, versus the buyer or seller in an organization. I can curate dashboards. We mocked this one up. Thank you, Alex.

We mocked this one up, but just inventory balance report. This is your world, your dashboard. You can create this how you'd like to. This just shows products, levels, scrap product quality...Go to scrap and some initial...I can't read that one fully on my screen, but it's unrestricted data related to inventory.

So as you know, inventory balance reports and inventory updates come with various attributes to give you the state of the inventory.

All that can be created because it's an attribute inside the actual data table. So we can take that and create a report and say, "I want to see everything that has gone to scrap. I want to see everything that is work in process, materials consumed and produced," things that nature you can imagine more because the data is going to be in the table, and we work through the table and build out a dashboard that tells us a story.

Audience Member: So you could build aging reports for inventory that's sitting too long with things that [indecipherable] specific time periods.

Tereance: Yep, and clicking the filter...We'll go to report and do it. Let me go here. I'll show you a peek into something as well. Go to reports quickly. I know we're a minute or so over here, but let me pull one up here quickly.
Henry: Don't want to take time from my boss.

Tereance: I know.

Audience Member: Don't worry. I won't [indecipherable] .

Tereance: I'll just...

Audience Member: Cool stuff with the product.

Tereance: So this is inside the report itself that show...gave us a dashboard in the prior screen. Over here on the right column, you see you have columns you can modify, filters, and then you can compute columns. So, yes, when you think about if you have some metrics to track today to calculate fields in Excel or another tool, you can replicate it here inside the solution.

I think in the interest of time, I'll pause there, but again, what's really also cool about this is I'm not logging in multiple times. I just click the link to go over to or tab to go over to my external manufacturing operation.

Maybe I double down. I do a lot of work in my company. I'm the warehouse person, but I also handle external manufacturing with CMOs. I can come in here, and now I see a new suite of transactions that are applicable to manufacturing that have been deployed. We go into ASNs even...Just a quick view.

Henry: We call those process networks. Correct? So each one of those?

Tereance: Well, yeah. So the process networks overall can operate as...Oh, now I see all three. Distributors are starting to manufacture logistics or process networks. You create individually based on the business operation, but if a user has access to your instance, they can log in and see all three.

The admin can say, "Well, I only want Bert to see external manufacturing. He needs to focus there," but someone else may have to manage distributors and logistics, so you can do that.

This shows a bit more of the related information, related to ASNs even. We've got tons of ASN data that now I can take this information, and I can load this, and I can view reference transactions. This is really cool because I can now relate the ASN to delivery order and a purchase order.

When the invoice comes in, you'll see a related transaction in there as well. So you're now not using a spreadsheet to piece together, to tell a story. You can use this in a plethora of ways to apply across the business.

Henry: Any questions on the demo? Go ahead.

Audience Member: Yeah. This is an offline question. I'm happy with this. So one of the things that's interesting is finding partners that are already on the platform. How do you recommend somebody who's looking to implement MINT go about talking to their external partners if they're not in the platform? So is there a script? Is there something that you can help facilitate?

Perfect example, where we would look to utilize this first is with an external CRO that we're working on clinical space. Not sure if they're in your network ready. The facilitation of that conversation, is that something that TraceLink typically would partake in? Do you have a script. Do you have something that helps walk a partner who hasn't seen this before through this visualization or through this process?

Henry: The answer is yes to all of that. We have scripts that will help facilitate those conversations. We obviously would like to sit with you first to make sure we fully understand the specific use case because some of the scripts we have already developed might need some fine tuning or tweaking.

As I mentioned in the earlier slides, it's really important to understand the value associated with MINT from both sides of the transactions to, exactly your point because we've seen some resistance from companies that don't really understand. They say, "Well, are you reducing my switching costs? I've substantially invested in integration with a customer and if I join the MINT program, does that mean that customer could easily move further away from me?"

Well, no. Not if you're providing high level quality service. In fact, you can increase your service levels and provide them with a higher quality of service, but it's a very good question and the answer to it is yes. We have those scripts today. We'll fine tune and refine those and work with you to support. Paul, yes, he wants to elaborate on it.

Paul: I'll cover this in the next session, but every MINT subscription in which you get all the capabilities, with the MINT subscription comes with a network program manager as well. So there's a whole network success team. They work with the customer and their trading partners for the full onboarding experience. So it's just part of the subscription.

So when Henry's talking about the scripts, it's actually the network program management team that's running those on the customer's behalf. We recognize that they're not typically doing that each and every day like we are, so we actually add it to the program.

Henry: We've already covered most of this, but it is important to think about it from the 3PL's perspective. So if you're a manufacturer, if you represent a manufacturer, and you're thinking of working with MINT, utilizing MINT to help better collaborate with your logistics service provider, it's thinking about the logistics service provider and how they're going to benefit from MINT.

It's about providing a higher quality of service to their customer, the drug manufacturer, and to the ultimate customer, their customer's customer, the patient, the pharmacy, the hospital, the clinic. So it's inventory visibility, reducing costs, increasing internal efficiencies.

We know from speaking with logistics service providers, sometimes they're doing manual processes to develop custom reports that then get emailed or maybe loaded into their custom portal and then needs to be pulled down. So there's a lot of manual work that goes on behind the scenes to provide support.

The ability to improve the responsiveness, be able to provide visibility on time in full deliveries, and be able to drive key performance indicators that can be measured and measured over a period of time to help ensure that there's process improvement and cost savings throughout that process.

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