Maintaining Supply Chain Resiliency, No Matter the Circumstances

Brent Wilhelm, SVP of Supply Chain Planning & Optimization, Cencora

In today’s interconnected global economy, maintaining a resilient supply chain is critical. The ability to deliver essential goods, including medications, to the people who need them, when they need them, is more challenging than ever.

Throw in natural disasters, labor shortages, or even production delays into the mix and the challenge becomes even harder to address. Even under the most ideal conditions, transporting specialized medications, including temperature-sensitive drugs and medical products, requires meticulous planning and rigorous frameworks for delivery. This challenge is amplified for long-distance deliveries, especially in rural communities with limited point-of-care facilities.

To adapt to these evolving trends, we must continuously reevaluate our supply chain networks, ensuring a constant stream of new solutions—both upstream and downstream—that reinforce supply chain infrastructure and mitigate future risks as circumstances change.

Establishing a flexible centralized distribution network

For drug distribution providers, maintaining a global network of distribution centers is critical. For more efficiency, manufacturers can deliver products to a single point of entry within a network. This simplified effort allows manufacturers to deliver several products with specific temperature requirements at scale, handing the reins to distributors who can package, ship, and transport products safely and with greater precision.

Under this centralized entry model, products can be sorted, moved, and packaged in a way that will ensure less risk within the lifecycle of transportation, on a faster timeline. This centralized model can also reduce delivery times, allowing products to reach their final destinations more quickly and into the hands of patients when they need them.

This single-source approach enables distributors to remain agile and flexible regardless of the circumstance, allowing for proactive planning, inventory management, and continuity measures so products reach the patients who need them—when they need them. Additionally, advancing cutting-edge innovations, together with close collaboration with partners and customers, is key to ensuring delivery success.

Navigating challenges before they strike

While it’s true that the scale and impact of various interferences can often be hard to predict, there are a number of steps drug distributors—alongside their partners—can take to mitigate any supply chain disruptions. Many of the steps needed to ensure a smooth and effective supply chain during times of crisis are rooted in collaboration.

Importantly, reinforcing the supply chain framework is also deeply connected to ongoing partnership with integral government partners and organizations who are on-the-ground—particularly in the case of natural disasters.

When these calamities do strike, connecting with groups such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency, local officials, and nonprofit organizations such as Healthcare Ready, allow distributors to gain access to areas of disaster and ship medical supplies and products without delay to these regions.

Finally, while it may not always be feasible, it’s important to have and try to stick to contingency plans for the circumstances the supply chain may be under. While it may be simple, taking the extra step to understand the limitations and capabilities of carrier partners will help usher quicker delivery to the areas that need it most in times of crisis.

The best packaging for any conditions

Part of the effort to maintain intact products—no matter the environment—includes choosing the best packaging for the specific conditions that will be encountered along the route. A suboptimal packaging selection can compromise the medication and result in further delays, additional costs, and potentially serious health complications.

Similarly, since new medications that require climate-controlled packaging cannot be left unsupervised, delays or disruptions from power outages, storms, or other challenges are a grave threat. Smart monitoring technology is one recent development that meets this need by tracking temperature-controlled packaging constantly, providing proof of shipment stability across the supply chain and alerting distributors if there is ever a change in the products’ temperature.

As the demands of the supply chain continue to evolve, it’s clear distributors and stakeholders across the pharmaceutical supply chain must continue to work together to ensure the latest treatments can reliably make it to the patients who need them, no matter what challenges may threaten the supply chain. With innovation, investment, and collaboration, we can future-proof and reinforce the supply chain to withstand any disruption.

Brent Wilhelm is Senior Vice President of Supply Chain Planning & Optimization at Cencora