Guidebook | How Biotech and Mid-Sized Pharma can Build CMO Partnerships that Hold Under Pressure

When you’re a mid-sized pharma or biotech company, external manufacturing isn’t a support function – it is your supply chain.

You don’t have excess capacity to fall back on. You don’t have teams dedicated solely to benchmarking suppliers or rewriting quality agreements every time regulations shift. Yet you’re expected to deliver the same reliability, compliance, and speed as companies many times your size, often in a market defined by tight capacity, rising costs, and geopolitical uncertainty.

This How-To Guide was created for organisations like yours. It brings together practical frameworks for benchmarking CMO/CDMO performance, guidance on quality agreements that actually drive accountability, real-world strategies for moving partnerships from fragile to agile, without adding unnecessary complexity or bureaucracy, and expert commentary from Tero Virtanen, Sourcing Manager, Orion Corporation.

Written with the realities of mid-sized pharma and biotech teams in mind, this guide focuses on what you can control: visibility, expectations, digital maturity, and partnership design.

Download to learn how to:

• Benchmark CMO/CDMO performance with confidence, using metrics that reflect today’s capacity, quality, and digital realities
• Draft and negotiate quality agreements that protect supply and accountability, not just legal positions
• Build agile partnerships that can absorb shocks, from regulatory change to material shortages and geopolitical disruption

If your growth, pipeline, or patient access depends on external manufacturers – and you can’t afford surprises – this guide gives you the structure, language, and tools to strengthen your partnerships before pressure turns into risk.

Download the guidebook now and take control of your CMO performance in 2026.