Cencora’s senior vice president of global supply chain, Brent Wilhelm, is drawing attention to one of pharmaceutical distribution’s most persistent blind spots.
Even when a therapy is correctly stocked and staged at the right facility, serious risks emerge the moment it leaves the warehouse network.
The final leg of drug delivery in the United States relies heavily on third-party carriers such as FedEx and UPS, whose networks operate largely outside Cencora’s direct control.
Wilhelm has been direct about where the vulnerability lies, stating: “Where there’s a larger risk is having visibility into the health of those networks.”
That risk became tangible during a significant weather event earlier this year that disrupted pharmaceutical logistics across a wide region of the country.
“Winter Storm Fern this past winter was a big issue in the southeast,” Wilhelm said, explaining how the storm severely impacted normal operations at FedEx’s Memphis hub and UPS’s Louisville hub for several days.
The disruption highlighted a counterintuitive lesson: routing a shipment through the nearest distribution site is not always the fastest or safest option when a carrier’s lane is compromised.
Weather events, congestion, and hub failures can render the most logical routing decisions counterproductive, leaving time-sensitive medications delayed at critical moments.
To address this, Cencora is currently testing AI models capable of ingesting live carrier data and automatically rerouting shipments toward whichever network path remains clear and operational.
The goal is to remove the manual burden of identifying disruptions and redirect product flows in real time before delays cascade through the supply chain.
Wilhelm also emphasises that delivery expectations vary considerably across Cencora’s customer base, adding further complexity to the final-mile challenge.
Some sites of care require only a single delivery per day, while others depend on multiple runs to maintain adequate stock for practitioners and patients.
Turnaround windows also differ significantly, ranging from next-day to two-day delivery depending on the specific drug and the ordering practitioner’s requirements.
The shift toward AI-assisted logistics signals a broader strategic effort at Cencora to close the gap between upstream inventory management and the last, most unpredictable stretch of pharmaceutical distribution.