Sterling Snapshot | Chris Neasham, Vice President of Global Procurement

Chris Neasham joined Sterling in January 2025 to lead our global procurement strategy and head up the team to support our business, customers and stakeholders.

Can you tell us about your education and background?

I’ve worked in the pharmaceutical and chemical industry for over 15 years, mainly within the contract development and manufacturing space, focusing on the procurement of API raw materials.

For the first three years of my career, I worked for a drug product manufacturer, originally in a planning role, supporting production and purchasing, and then I had the opportunity to move into my first procurement role as a Purchasing Officer. It was then that I decided to further my education, and I went on to obtain qualifications in logistics, materials, supply chain management and procurement through the Chartered Institute of Procurement and Supply (CIPS), completing my MCIPS qualification in 2019.

During this time, I held positions including Global Procurement Manager and Associate Director of Procurement. Most recently, I joined Sterling as Vice President of Global Procurement.

What does your role as Vice President of Global Procurement involve?

In my role, I work as part of the operational leadership team, reporting into our Chief Operations Officer, alongside other heads of global functions and the site leads. This helps to ensure harmonisation across our network, including our approach to health and safety practices, metrics reporting, production schedule adherence and procuring materials, which all help support our One Sterling strategy.

However, my main responsibility is setting our global procurement strategy and overseeing its implementation alongside the team. We aim to align policies, procedures and best practices across our network of sites to ensure that we have a consistent approach to procurement. We want to ensure that our customers have access to the same global supply base, no matter which of our sites their project is placed in and that we are using data and efficient systems to drive our decisions.

At Sterling, our Western based facilities provide us access to an abundance of opportunities and vendors to work with. Our goal is to determine the most reliable and agile supply sources, ensuring they have the right technical competencies to meet ours and our customers’ needs.

We want to make sure that we continue to offer our customers a transparent and reliable raw material strategy for any of their chemical syntheses, and we can achieve this by ensuring we work with long-term, qualifiable, and compliant partners. In turn, this ensures continuity of supply throughout a customers’ product lifecycle, and mitigates the need to re-qualify suppliers or processes as they come to the commercial stage or scale their project to meet peak demand.

As part of our partnership offering, and to ensure we build a robust solution capable of meeting that future demand, we remove and manage any supply chain issues on the customer’s behalf to make the process of working with Sterling as easy as possible for them. Where customers have existing preferred vendors, our approach allows us to become an extension of our customers’ supply chain teams and work with their supply chain.

These elements really set the pillars of success in place. They help us to build strong relationships and trust with customers and vendors alike, which allows us to be a contract development and manufacturing organisation (CDMO) that people want to work with time and time again. Our aim is to delight our customers and provide the best service possible, through ensuring quality of material procured, doing our due diligence, and that our employees are safe in our laboratories and on our plants, and we do our upmost to protect the patients who will eventually receive the drugs.

How does your role support our customers?

Sterling’s customers benefit from access to our extensive knowledge and experience across our global network, as well as our vendors and supply base in order to meet their product and material needs throughout the course of their project. Depending on business type, not all customers will have a background in procurement and supply chain, so that’s something we can support them with as a team.

When appropriate, procurement get involved early in the business RFP process so that we can use our supply chain knowledge and approved manufacturing network to assess opportunities to potentially outsource part of the suggested chemical synthesis. We find that this is beneficial to the projects overall cost of goods as, outsourcing a later intermediate will reduce the length of synthesis required in our GMP plant, thus reducing the program cost and ensuring that we are adding value by manufacturing only the necessary steps. These activities are always reviewed and agreed with our customer prior to moving forward with any information sharing with a nominated third party.

It’s important that procurement’s involvement starts at the very beginning of their relationship with Sterling, as we can help influence decisions to ensure that the suppliers or raw materials selected early in the project’s lifecycle are sustainable as it scales and goes onto commercial manufacture, which in turn, helps our customers to stay within timelines and budgets.

I’ve experienced all sorts of turbulence that a business can go through as a result of the macro environment during my career, for example Brexit and the Covid-19 pandemic. Ensuring that we have an effective and pragmatic approach to material delivery, and that our strategy for raw materials is robust means we can support our business and our customers in navigating these challenges.

What do you enjoy about working at Sterling?

The people across the network, and everyone’s collective approach to doing the right thing. The vast amount of product we deliver across our network, and the knowledge of how many patients lives we can have a positive impact on is not lost on our teams, and everyone knows just how much what we do matters.