Software solutions specialist Tessella has launched the Supply Forecasting Tool (SFT), at the Clinical Supply Forecasting Summit in Philadelphia, to allow pharma and biotech companies to model the clinical supply chain efficiently and effectively.
Kathy Reinold, Tessella's Clinical Technologies Product Manager, explained: "The efficient management of clinical trials continues to be a major focus for drug development companies. To ensure adequate drug supply at hundreds of sites, drug supply managers almost require a crystal ball. They have to cope with different customs regulations, shipping companies and delivery times, and provide instructions in multiple languages.
In addition, they must predict the number of subjects that will be recruited onto the trial (and predict the treatment groups to which they will be assigned), predict the number of subjects in each treatment group that will drop out of the study, and predict delivery delays, loss of supply due to damage in transit, and more.
"At Tessella, we have applied our extensive experience solving complex problems, and our advanced statistical modeling expertise, to addressing these needs, and have co-developed with our first customer UBC the Tessella Supply Forecasting Tool to provide drug supply managers with that illusive crystal ball."
Tom Parke, Tessella's Head of Clinical Trials Solutions, continued: "Tessella SFT provides an intuitive, easy-to-use interface, and the capability to import data, lists of centers, standard shipping times, etc, to allow the rapid development of drug supply plans.
"The tool's advanced modeling of events, and simulation of the clinical supply chain, predicts how well a particular drug supply plan is likely to perform. Adopting SFT across an organization facilitates the sharing of expertise and encourages standardized techniques providing for more consistent drug supply management."
Key features of Tessella SFT include: an easy-to-use interface; accurate forecasting; adjustable re-supply algorithms; comprehensive coverage of factors that affect supply; support for site-based, central, stratified and adaptive randomization; user-defined report generation; and simple integration through standard XML interfaces. The tool is also highly customizable.
Grant Stephen, CEO of Tessella Inc added: "The future of drug supply management will not become less complex, but tools that model the supply chain and trial events and perform hundreds of simulations can make the task more manageable. Tessella has been a leading independent supplier of custom-built software solutions to the pharma and biotech communities for many years, priding ourselves on understanding our clients' business and technical requirements, and working with them to provide innovative solutions.
More information at http://www.tessella.com/Services/Discipline/sft/sft.htm