Social Business By Design: Transformative Social Media Strategies for the Connected Company

Optimizing Supply Chains with Social Business: Teva Canada

In summer 2011, Teva Canada, a large pharmaceutical firm, publicly reported that it had achieved an unheard-of level of orders fulfilled on time: an impressive 95 percent. It also claimed its manufacturing cycle time had been cut in half, to an average of less than forty days.⁴ Teva achieved this high level of operational accomplishment because of a key acquisition the year before: Ratiopharm, a German pharmaceutical company. The new firm brought with it some novel supply chain management methods that employed social media to resolve a set of long-standing supply chain issues.

A few years prior to being acquired, Ratiopharm vice president for supply chain Antonio Martins, facing continued ...