What is depot allocation?
Depot allocation is the decision of how to distribute clinical trial supply across regional depots — the warehouses that receive drug from manufacturing or packaging and ship it onward to trial sites. Allocation determines how much of each product each depot holds, based on the demand forecast for the sites and countries that depot serves.
Most multi-region trials ship drug from a central point to regional depots (for example North America, EU, and APAC), and from depots to sites. Each leg has its own lead time, and cross-depot transfers are slow and expensive — so drug positioned in the wrong region is almost as bad as drug that doesn't exist.
Allocation therefore has to follow the regional shape of the demand forecast, not just its total. A trial forecasted to enroll heavily in Eastern Europe needs its supply weighted toward the depot serving those countries, and when enrollment shifts between regions mid-trial — which it usually does — the allocation needs to shift with it.
Getting allocation right depends on aggregating site-level demand up to the depot that serves each site, then planning production and deployment against depot-level demand rather than a single global number.
How TrialSupply handles this
TrialSupply models the supply chain network — sites, depots, and the routes between them — and aggregates the site-level demand forecast up to depot-level demand automatically. Supply plans are then built against each depot's demand, so allocation decisions reflect where patients actually are.