Consider this scenario, which demonstrates how an on demand company can rapidly respond to a marketplace opportunity: The morning newspaper reported that our leading competitor was cited at last week's medical conference in Geneva for having a product that was suddenly creating negative side effects in chronic patients who had used the drug for more than six months. On Friday, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) ordered a stop to its use until the Geneva report results could be studied, recommending that doctors use alternative treatments. Three million patients regularly used the suspended product -- in the past, it had proven difficult to convert them to ours, which does not have the reported side effects. We quickly convened a meeting of the supply chain and manufacturing management teams that morning to consider how best to react to the news from Geneva and the FDA. Manufacturing could not produce enough additional product to replace its rival, but its alliance with another pharmaceutical firm could provide plant capacity to do the job. So, management placed an immediate order for large volumes. Working with marketing that night, supply chain management announced to doctors and pharmacies all over the world that additional supplies would be available within a couple of days. Overnight mail transporters, already under contract to supply individual doses of other products to patients, were told when and where to pick up the new quantities of medicines. Within 48 hours, hundreds of thousands of additional doses were on their way into the market. Doctors had been informed about the characteristics of the drugs and pharmacies were already processing prescription changes. Within two weeks, the rival's lost business had been replaced with our product. Such quick action was possible thanks to an infrastructure created to support reliable, focused response to unanticipated changes -- an eloquent, revenue-boosting example of doing business on demand. The pharmaceutical industry is on the verge of important changes, many of which have to be anticipated and addressed now. Three unstoppable drivers are beginning to exert their influence on the industry: Competitive Darwinism. A competitive Darwinism is at work, making it more difficult for firms to work as competitors blur traditional boundaries. As Darwin demonstrated over a century ago, those species that failed to survive were often strong and smart, but they were unable to adapt to changing circumstances. Continuous discontinuities. Continuous discontinuities (ongoing disruptions to business operations and product development) evident in the industry make up a second group of drivers compelling firms to respond more quickly. The most adaptive organizations have the greatest chance of surviving and thriving. Unrelenting financial pressure. A third driver concerns slower profit growth as both the top and bottom lines are squeezed, creating unrelenting financial pressures on the pharmaceutical industry. Already, industry revenue growth has dropped from the expected nine percent of a few years ago to rates today closer to 5.5 percent.1 To learn more about how each of these drivers can be addressed through deployment of on demand strategies, download the pdf file at the top of this page. | 
