A Sustainable Procurement and Resilience Framework for Post-Pandemic Pharmaceutical Operations

This paper proposes a Sustainable Procurement and Resilience Framework (SPRF) for post-pandemic pharmaceutical operations, aligning environmental, social, and governance objectives with uninterrupted patient access. The framework integrates dual-sourcing and nearshoring with supplier segmentation and risk-adjusted inventory policies for active pharmaceutical ingredients, excipients, packaging, and cold-chain logistics. It embeds science-based decarbonization targets, hazard-aware sourcing, while ensuring compliance with GMP and broader GxP obligations across the product lifecycle. Technically, SPRF unifies process automation and process mining through a digital control tower. Standardized data models and API-first integration enable end-to-end traceability from tier-n suppliers to distribution hubs. Intelligent document processing accelerates onboarding, quality agreements, and batch-release dossiers, while rules engines automate three- and four-way matching, deviations, and nonconformance escalations. Scenario planning and stochastic safety-stock optimization balance service levels and waste, and IoT-enabled condition monitoring secures the temperature-controlled supply chain. Methodologically, SPRF follows a five-step cycle: assess, design, deploy, monitor, and improve. Assessment stress-tests demand variability, maps multi-tier concentration and geopolitical risk, and quantifies carbon footprints alongside GMP/GxP conformance. Design translates policy into canonical data, supplier scorecards, risk thresholds, and workflow controls with segregation of duties and exception pathways. Deployment uses low-code orchestration and secure APIs to automate due diligence, sustainability attestations, technical transfers, and quality documentation. Monitoring fuses events, conformance checking, and anomaly detection to trigger corrective and preventive actions. Improvement closes the loop through retrospectives, supplier development plans, and portfolio rebalancing. Expected outcomes include fewer stockouts, shorter cycle times, higher first-pass quality, and measurable reductions in total cost of ownership and product carbon footprint. Ethics and access are advanced via responsible sourcing in vulnerable geographies, anti-counterfeit safeguards, and affordability mechanisms. Governance is strengthened through immutable audit trails, role-based access, data minimization, and retention aligned to regulatory requirements. To support adoption, maturity metrics, training curricula, and change-management playbooks guide scaling across sites and partners. The framework is adaptable across small, mid, and large manufacturers, and supports humanitarian supply chains during emergencies and protracted crises globally.