Case studies

Cardinal Health, a billion-dollar pharmaceutical distribution and logistics firm, manages multiple products from brand name pharmaceuticals and generic drugs to over the counter drugs, health & beauty items and their own private label. They face a multitude of typical distribution warehouse challenges that are further complicated by the nature of pharmaceutical products. Brian Heath, Director of Advanced Analytics at Cardinal Health, and an experienced user of AnyLogic software, employed agent based modeling to solve various business problems, saving Cardinal Health over $3 Million annually.

Pfizer, one of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies, asked Fair Dynamics, in collaboration with Health Services Consulting Corporation, to develop a platform that would help the company’s researchers test a new drug for patients with painful diabetic peripheral neuropathy. The platform would be based on previous clinical studies and act as a decision support tool, which could assess a patient’s personal parameters, prescribe drug dosage, and predict possible outcomes.

This model simulates the maternity ward in a hospital currently under construction. The purpose of the model is to support discussions related to which resources, capacity, and work methods are required on the new ward. The project was carried out for Karolinska University Hospital in the Stockholm County, Sweden.

GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) was the world’s sixth largest pharmaceutical company in 2014. The company was launching a new vaccine product on a new market that needed a distribution network different from what they had before. Therefore, the company needed to design a new supply chain and align manufacturing processes with it.

Sterling Simulation consulting company was chosen to provide an agent-based marketing model for a pharmaceutical firm. The company owned two competing non-generic drugs on the same market. One drug was well established and tended to be the industry leader, and the other one was recently introduced. There were several concerns about how to obtain a useful market share for the newer drug, while maintaining or increasing the market share for the company’s drugs as a whole.

Indiana University Health Arnett Hospital, consisting of a full-service acute care hospital and a multispecialty clinic, faced poor statistics because the number of no-show patients (those who don’t show up for their scheduled appointments) rose dramatically to 30%. This was primarily connected to the fact that clinic schedules were driven by individual preferences of the medical staff, which led to increased variations in scheduling rules. To eliminate the problem, the client wanted to develop a scheduling methodology that would benefit the clinic, doctors, and patients.

The Sterling Simulation consulting company was hired by a pharmaceutical giant to create a supply chain model. The client was introducing one of their products to new markets and wanted to visualize the restructuring of the supply chain and how it would react to demand uncertainty. The company’s goal was to reduce lead time while maintaining fill rate and avoiding backorders or lost sales. The client wanted a flexible ‘what if’ tool for risk mitigation analysis.

A biotech startup, providing experimental personalized medical treatment, wanted to conduct data-driven pharmaceutical manufacturing simulation to optimize decision-making processes when delivering new products. These products were undergoing clinical trials, and the manufacturing processes remained unclear while US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval was pending. The company was short of resources, but it was crucial to produce its products as fast as possible and without failures.

Stockholm County, Sweden was in the process of building a new, highly specialized hospital. The Health Administration of the county questioned whether they would get an acceptable level of care production with the current investments and reasoning concerning various operational and strategic issues. To find the answers, they used simulation modeling in AnyLogic.

One of the huge pharmaceutical companies employed Bayser Consulting for development of product launch strategy. Simulation modeling was applied for reconstruction of interactions between the company, doctors and patients.