The Ultimate Guide: Scenario Planning Clinical Supply Decisions

Patient enrollment can vary widely within regions, countries and sites due to competitive enrollment and other variables such as discontinuation rate, titration probabilities, weight or Body Surface Area (BSA) of patients which directly impacts dispensing. It is also not uncommon for protocol amendments to add new treatment arms, countries, or introduce changes to the depot/supply network.

This unpredictability increases the complexity of clinical supply planning.

Think about all the key assumptions that are made at the onset of a clinical trial surrounding packaging design, sourcing/ manufacturing and distribution. What if those assumptions shift? Do you know with a certain level of confidence how changes in those assumptions impact the clinical supply strategy? Would you be able to show your operations or financial counterparts the impact of those decisions in a timely and efficient manner? 

This is why scenario planning is so valuable, and critical to help manage the variability in clinical trial supply decisions. Scenario planning puts the power back into your hands to explore possible outcomes based on specific combinations of events. Simply put, it enables you to find the best strategy while balancing risks and costs as well as gives you the ability to arm your internal stakeholders with impact assessment data based on plausible scenarios.