“Our on-time-in-full delivery was 30%. In the beer industry, it’s around 99%. That was a big shock.”
When Gijs Vissers joined the pharmaceutical industry, he saw that supply chain operations were often driven by fragmented processes, minimal performance tracking, and cost-focused supplier relationships that created more problems than solutions. Drawing on lessons from the beer industry, where on-time-in-full delivery routinely exceeds 99%, Gijs has spent years transforming pharmaceutical supply chain approaches, achieving employee engagement scores above 80% while dramatically improving supply reliability.
Gijs Vissers, Head of Supply Chain and Procurement at Nordic Pharma, brings over 20 years of supply chain and procurement experience across fast-moving consumer goods, telecommunications, and pharmaceuticals, including senior roles at Heineken, Bavaria, and DSM before joining Nordic Pharma as Head of Supply Chain and Procurement. His career trajectory reflects a deliberate shift from commercial functions to operational excellence, driven by his Lean Six Sigma training and a conviction that the industry’s greatest asset is its people, not its processes.
In a recent interview, Gijs shared his approach to rebuilding pharmaceutical supply chains from the ground up, moving from reactive vendor management to strategic CDMO partnerships anchored in transparency, long-term forecasting, and patient-centric objectives.
Establishing Performance Baselines: What Gets Measured Gets Managed
Gijs’s transformation approach begins with establishing clear performance metrics.
The approach emphasizes starting small with simple KPIs before building toward broader excellence strategies. Key elements include:
Data visibility: Making performance metrics transparent across the organization so everyone understands current state and improvement targets.
Forecasting discipline: Asking sales teams to commit to projections and holding them accountable for accuracy.
Cross-functional alignment: Bringing together sales, inventory management, and manufacturing planning around shared metrics.
This data-driven methodology delivers improved operational metrics, enhanced supplier relationships, and employee satisfaction. “The results didn’t only become better in terms of sales and profits,” Gijs explained. “The relationships with suppliers improved because we provided more transparency, and engagement surveys showed people were quite happy, averaging above 80%.”
Strategic Partnerships Replace Transactional Sourcing
Rather than optimizing for lowest cost through multi-sourcing strategies, Gijs advocates for deliberately consolidating CDMO relationships, implementing dual or single sourcing arrangements backed by transparent, long-term commitments.
“I think creating partnerships is much better than looking only at price,” Gijs explained. “We acknowledge that sometimes we have to pay a little bit more to get better results. But we should look at it as a whole, not as single parts.”
This partnership model rests on several operational pillars:
24-month rolling forecasts: Nordic Pharma provides CDMOs with extended visibility, with the first six months 100% binding and months 7-12 at 80% commitment. This forecasting horizon enables manufacturing partners to optimize capacity planning and make confident capital investments.
Multi-year agreements: Contracts extend beyond annual cycles, providing stability for both parties and enabling joint investment in process improvements.
Bi-annual business reviews: Formal strategic alignment sessions complement monthly supply-demand meetings and weekly operational touchpoints between planners and CDMO counterparts.
Quarterly executive engagement: Gijs personally visits manufacturing sites to observe operations and maintain relationship depth beyond contractual discussions.
Full Transparency: Redefining Supplier Relationships
The partnership approach Gijs advocates demands reciprocal transparency that would be uncommon in traditional supplier relationships. This means sharing detailed order volumes, historical spending data, and future projections with CDMOs, while requesting comparable openness about manufacturing economics and operational challenges.
“We show the amount of orders we have done, what we have spent over the past few years, what we’re spending now, and what we are projecting for the next year,” Gijs explained. “In most cases, they’re quite transparent about their operations as well. If they tell us that their profit is not high enough or they have challenges, we always look at potential projects together.”
This mutual vulnerability creates problem-solving dynamics fundamentally different from adversarial negotiation. When CDMOs face margin pressure or operational constraints, the approach involves collaborating on improvement initiatives rather than simply seeking alternative suppliers.
Gijs frames this relationship philosophy through a marriage metaphor: “You need to invest in a relationship. You cannot always have a honeymoon. In order to make sure that we remain close to that honeymoon period, we need to invest from both sides.”
Regional Sourcing Strategy: Balancing Quality, Sustainability, and Resilience
Post-COVID supply chain disruptions led Gijs to advocate for concentrating manufacturing partnerships regionally, a strategic decision based on multiple converging factors:
Geographic proximity: Reduced lead times and transportation risks by locating CMOs closer to operational footprints and target markets.
Quality assurance: Regional manufacturing sites in developed markets typically maintain higher quality standards, reducing regulatory risk and batch rejection rates.
ESG alignment: Shorter logistics chains reduce carbon footprint while simplifying sustainability compliance and audit processes.
This regional consolidation strategy contradicts conventional risk mitigation wisdom favoring geographic diversification. However, Gijs argues that in the current geopolitical environment, deep partnerships with fewer, higher-quality manufacturers create more resilience than fragmented relationships across multiple continents.
“When you create a true partnership, and you start all working on the same end goal, I think this is a better solution than trying to diversify as much as possible to get the best price,” Gijs explained.
Identifying Strategic Partners: Beyond First-Date Impressions
Gijs’s CDMO selection process extends well beyond technical capabilities and pricing. He advocates for comprehensive due diligence encompassing financial stability, customer references, climate risk assessments, and ESG performance before initiating formal negotiations.
“On a first date, you always want to show the best of yourself,” Gijs observed. “When the story evolves, then you see different sides of people. That is the moment when it becomes interesting.”
The evaluation process should involve cross-functional teams spanning quality, regulatory, supply chain, procurement, and finance. This multi-stakeholder approach ensures comprehensive assessment while testing CDMOs’ organizational depth and collaborative capacity.
Gijs recommends confronting potential partners with preliminary research findings during RFP processes, using their responses to gauge transparency and problem-solving orientation. Compatible organizational cultures, demonstrated through multi-layer engagement and responsive communication, should become decisive factors alongside technical competence.
Patient-Centric Supply Chains: Operational Realities
Gijs’s supply chain philosophy centers on the idea that the patient’s needs should drive all operational decisions. However, translating this principle into practice demands sophisticated planning, risk tolerance, and occasionally accepting higher costs to ensure product availability.
“We should always have the patient in the front position,” Gijs stated. “For whom are we doing this, and what do they need?”
This patient-first orientation manifests in several operational practices:
Proactive market monitoring: Continuously tracking global supply conditions and regulatory developments, adjusting manufacturing plans to anticipate disruptions before they impact patients.
Strategic overproduction: For critical products, accepting obsolescence risk by manufacturing beyond immediate demand projections, prioritizing supply continuity over inventory optimization.
Regulatory collaboration: Engaging health agencies proactively to discuss buffer stock requirements, shelf-life flexibility, and shortage prevention strategies.
API security measures: For products with vulnerable active pharmaceutical ingredient supplies, requiring manufacturers to maintain two batches of inventory despite higher carrying costs.
Gijs recounted how transparency about supply challenges and willingness to share costs with API suppliers secured preferential treatment compared to larger pharmaceutical companies pursuing purely transactional relationships. By openly discussing constraints and collaboratively developing solutions, Nordic Pharma positioned itself as a valued partner rather than simply another customer.
Resilience Through Collaboration
As pharmaceutical supply chains confront escalating geopolitical volatility, regulatory complexity, and sustainability mandates, Gijs advocates for industry-wide collaboration rather than competitive isolation. He emphasizes collective action on standardization, particularly around ESG reporting frameworks and decarbonization initiatives.
“Working together is the key,” Gijs argued. “We cannot do it by ourselves. When we can agree on industry standards, it makes it easier.”
He cited initiatives like the Schneider Energy Initiative’s collective electricity purchasing program as examples of how pharmaceutical companies and CDMOs can achieve sustainability and cost objectives simultaneously through coordinated action.
Gijs will be bringing this collaborative mindset to CDMO Live Europe in Rotterdam on May 21st, where he will moderate a roundtable titled ‘Decarbonizing Pharmaceutical Manufacturing: Partnering for Scope 3 Impact‘ on behalf of PSCI, exploring how supply chain partnerships can drive meaningful emissions reductions across the industry.
Looking toward 2030, Gijs identifies resilience as the defining characteristic of successful supply chains. He advocates thinking in terms of end-to-end networks with patients at the center, abandoning short-term price optimization for long-term partnership stability.
“Don’t invent the wheel, copy with pride,” Gijs advised. “Tell others that you really like the things that they have done, and ask them if you can learn from them to help improve the entire network. If you tell someone that you really enjoy what they’ve been doing, you give them a compliment. How can they then refuse you not to share their experience?”
