Sourcing Transformation Lead - London, United Kingdom - Takeda Pharmaceutical

Takeda Pharmaceutical

Verified Company

London, United Kingdom

1 week ago

Posted by:

Tom O´Connor

beBee Recruiter

Description

_ OBJECTIVES/PURPOSE _
Over the last few years, sourcing has become more difficult for the whole Pharmaceutical industry, and particularly for Biologics. Sourcing items that used to be easy and reliable has become difficult and unreliable.

Ensuring availability of incoming materials has become a very important factor in successful manufacturing, testing, and supply of biological drugs.

COVID, increased demand from emerging economies, regulatory complexities, conflicts like the war in the Ukraine, extreme weather events all contribute to sourcing difficulties.

In this context, the Sourcing Transformation Lead is accountable to lead a transformation in Takeda's Biologics Operating unit (OpU) to improve the overall robustness and resilience of our sourcing processes.

All necessary levers can be considered including:

Improving inventory management and sourcing practices across the Biologics OPU
Improving alignment of quality specifications for materials, to enable flexibility across sites
Qualifying additional sites and suppliers
Qualifying alternative materials
Improving processes and governance to improve visibility, anticipation, crisis management for sourcing issues.

The topic is large, as we use tens of thousands of incoming materials in Biologics manufacturing and testing, which could all potentially threaten our operations and supply if we stock-out.

The project is bringing together contributions of many functions, teams, sites across the business.

We are currently implementing some additional/dedicated resources (~ 10 FTEs) in specific functions that are seen as bottlenecks in sourcing mitigation actions (material change management, manufacturing science, and regulatory affairs).

Current initiatives are structured around 5 key categories: single use systems, media and excipients, chemicals, filters, and QC consumables.

The key responsibilities of the incombent are to:

Define and implement a strategy to improve the resilience and robustness of our sourcing processes
Engage the necessary functions and resources to support our ambition
Provide structure to the initiative and ensure progress of the workstreams
Assess cost and benefit of the various mitigation options and propose prioritization of activities (including workload impact for the various teams and functions)

Collect data (market intelligence), analyze, summarize, generate insights

All the OPU's incoming materials are in the scope, for manufacturing and QC.

The primary scope is for internal manfacturing and testing but:

There are interdependencies with CMOs, in particular where we have both internal and external manufacturing lines, and that the sharing of information and of materials, can help mitigate issues at Takeda or for our CMOs
There is testing done by Takeda QC for externally manufactured batches, and external QC testing for batches manufactured internally
The requirements for incountry testing are evolving and the model for sourcing of reagents needs to be reviewed and clarified (esp. For China).