Exploring new supply chain strategies in the pharmaceutical industry

As the industrial environment becomes more competitive, supply chain management (SCM) has become a topic of interest to many authors. In particular, in the last decades, pharmaceutical industry has been interested by significant changes that have led companies to put into practice different SCM initiatives. The aim of this paper is to investigate the implementation of improvement initiatives which companies undertake to obtain better supply network performance level. Following Meredith’s (1998) suggestion to use case studies as a basis for theory formulation, insights from four cases were used to explore the phenomenon and to build a new theory. It was found that a preferred sequence of implementation of SCM improvement initiatives in the pharmaceutical industry exists. It implies two main steps: the redesigning of supply network configuration aiming to exploit economies of scale and the adoption of supplier/demand integration initiatives. The paper seeks to clarify why companies tend to prefer particular sequences of implementation of SCM initiatives