A new edition of the event Uruguay Best Practices in Pharma Supply Chain brought together all the players in the pharmaceutical industry. The activity was co-organized between the investment promotion agency, exports and country image. Uruguay XXIhe National Institute of Logistics (INALOG) and Uruguay Pharma HUB Groupmade up of the main companies in the sector installed in the country Uruguay: Adium Pharma, AstraZeneca, Boehringer Ingelheim, GSK, MegaLabs, Merck, Pfizer and Roche.
The activity brought together more than 200 prominent national and international representatives of the industry and made it possible to learn about the advantages that Uruguay offers as a “logistics hub” for the pharmaceutical industry, analyzing topics such as leadership in supply chainsecurity and traceability in the logistics chain, control of the cold chain and sustainability in the distribution chain, among others.
This year, in addition, topics such as the impact of the sector on patients, opportunities for implementation of artificial intelligence and innovative solutions to achieve access and sustainability.
“Our role is to promote investment in the country, but also for companies to exchange with each other. Together we can make visible Uruguay as a logistics hub and as a country with legal, political, economic and social stability, aspects that investors value when we ask them why they are here,” said the executive director of Uruguay XXI, Sebastian Risso to Ambit.
Risso added that these are important strengths for logistics operations and sensitive products such as pharmaceuticals, to which are added infrastructure and regulations with more than 30 years such as free port and airport regimes, free zones or temporary admission. .
“We have pharmaceutical companies that use Uruguay as a service center, as a logistics center, another as a manufacturing center, another as a commerce. In other words, several verticals and the country is positioned very well as a recipient of pharmaceutical products from Europe or from countries of the Mercosur“, explained the leader.
The president of INALOG, Alvaro Olazábal, expressed that “when well-integrated and coordinated sectors emerge, such as the pharmaceutical sector that operates in Uruguay, it obviously spreads to the entire logistics sector.” “It has been able to take very good advantage of the promotional regimes it has in its different logistics platforms in order to provide services to the region,” he assessed.
“The sector has had a strategy of developing talent and providing intelligence. In other words, practices today in logistics and especially in regional logistics cannot be improved if they are not developed. talent or intelligence is not given. I give an example, if a child or young person has talent in music, if they do not pay attention to developing that talent, that aptitude is lost. In an economic sector or specifically in the pharmaceutical sector, not paying attention to developing talent and transferring intelligence results in not having good practices. And not having good practices has a negative impact on becoming a logistics hub,” said Olazábal.
Jorge Riveroregional manager for Latin America of international business and customs regulation at Roche, pointed out that “Uruguay has a combo that is very attractive in the sense that the first thing that always attracts attention, especially to eyes from abroad, is economic and social stability. They are rules of the game that are really clear and that different segments have also been contributing their grain of sand to promote, from the private side, that spirit as a country of developing outwards and towards the region.”
“We are positioned here for the products part as recipients in transit for Paraguay and Bolivia and of course for everything that is the local market. But we also have a great regional team that is in Montevideo “which provides services both to the region and globally, especially in medicines and diagnostic equipment,” said the executive in dialogue with Ambit.
“We must keep in mind that it is a sector where innovation is very very great and Roche places a lot of emphasis on everything that is investigation and innovation. So from there it is what makes it so variable but it allows us to amalgamate that enormous structure that the company has also with a very great speed and flexibility of adaptation,” commented Rivero.
Source: Ambito
