Last year, the volcano in Iceland “trapped” several of my coworkers in Paris and Rome, and that episode led me to conclude that organizations need to do some heavy-duty disaster planning if they’re serious about globalization. I must admit that, even in my wildest Day After Tomorrow / 2012dreams, I never conceived of an earthquake-tsunami-nuclear-meltdown hat trick coinciding with a sharp uptick in oil prices because of street-level revolutions in the mideast.*

Transportation prices are climbing and electronics companies are already citing component shortages due to problems with their just-in-time suppliers in Japan. (I guess I’ll have to stick with my first-gen iPad for a while.) In our industry, I’ve heard a report of one Japanese pharma that had put off adding a secondary, ex-Japan supplier for its drug substance for years, clinging to the notion of “What could possibly happen to disrupt our supply?” What, indeed?

So, does Japan’s crisis carry the same lesson as the Eyjafjallaj�kull eruption in 2010? That is, that global-scale JIT works just fine until it doesn’t? That we need to refocus on local sourcing and not be so dependent on trade in far-off regions? On the face of it, it does seem like an obvious, cautionary conclusion, but who am I to embrace the obvious?

I think that this disaster is as much about the importance of global networks, as it is an illustration of their limits. The first weeks after the meltdown have shown how important it is for Japan to have close ties, a “secondary supply network” of sorts, spanning business and government. The stronger those ties are (even with a long-standing cultural reticence against imported goods), the faster a region can get back on its feet.

* I should note that there’s a difference between “disaster planning” and ”armageddon planning.” After the Great Northeast Blackout of 2003, in which I lost the hard drive in my old PC, I vowed never to get caught with my digital pants down again. Some might call it overkill to have six separate backups for my main hard drive and iTunes and movie libraries, but I consider it Boy Scout-ish preparedness. Of course, that level of precaution won’t be much help in a post-apocalyptic, Road-like landscape, unless I can clock marauders over the head with all my spare disk drives.

Gil Roth

Editor – gil@rodpub.com / twitter.com/contractpharma

P.S.: The Contract Pharma family wishes a speedy recovery to John Bertagnolli at Jubilant HollisterStier after his recent health scare.

We also extend our condolences to the family of Rick Lapointe, who died on March 3 after a lengthy battle with Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma. Rick was an executive at Hollister-Stier, OSO BioPharmaceuticals and Catalent, and a good friend of the magazine and this editor for more than a decade. We’ll miss him.

Correction

In our March issue, the article Packaging & Serialization by Stephen Barlas included the sentence:

GS1 charges upwards of $1 million for membership, though it makes room for participants at lower levels under certain conditions.

That $1 million figure came about because of aninadvertent misstatement by a GS1 executive. Jon Mellor,a spokesman for GS1 US, subsequently clarified that no one pharma industry company pays more than “five figures” total for membership in GS1’s 100-plus international affiliates, of which GS1 US is only one component. More than 80% of GS1 members are small and medium businesses spendingin the three- or four-figure range.

What I’m Reading

Online

Pharmaceutical Industry Near Collapse BecauseIt Is Stupid and Incredibly Bad at Its Business

By Tom Scocca, Slate – http://slate.me/hxHOpz

Comment: Once again, try not to get too angry when yourealize this person is actually paid to write columns like this.

Johnson & Johnson’s Quality Catastrophe

David Voreacos, Alex Nussbaum and Greg Farrell,Bloomberg BusinessWeek –http://buswk.co/e5hjdX

Comment: L-O-N-G cover story exploring the roots of the quality problems that have plagued one of the world’s biggest healthcare companies. It centers on the problems with a DuPuy artificial hip, but covers the broader issues pretty well.

In Print

1959: The Year Everything Changed

By Fred Kaplan � http://www.amazon.com/dp/0470387815

Comment: The author makes the argument that 1959 was epochal in terms of culture, foreign relations, civil rights, and, yes, pharmaceuticals.

What are you reading? Let me know at gil@rodpub.com, www.linkedin.com/groupsgid=1775433 or www.facebook.com/contractpharma