Pharmaceutical third-party logistics (3PL) providers are moving beyond traditional warehousing into more holistic and strategic commercialization support. At the same time, rising demand for temperature-sensitive biologics and increasingly strict regulations necessitates 3PLs to build and scale advanced cold chain capabilities and maintain a forward-looking approach to evolving regulations, digital technologies, and industry trends.
Cencora is one organization leaning into these shifts. We spoke with Albert Cooksey, senior vice-president and general manager of 3PL Services for ICS, a Cencora company, about what he’s seeing in the market and how 3PLs are evolving to keep pace.
Q. How are regulatory expectations evolving in pharmaceutical logistics, and how are 3PLs adapting?
Albert Cooksey: It’s definitely evolving. Traditionally what was required from a 3PL was relatively straightforward, but now it’s becoming a lot more dynamic. There is a more concerted effort now in ensuring that we’re keeping up with the different requirements that are out there and those that might be coming up, especially as we enter into engagements with new therapies such as cell and gene therapies. Those can bring some other components of regulatory compliance that will evolve over time. A key example is the requirements for serialization, because a lot of times these shipments are patient-specific. In the US, sometimes we’ve seen the FDA has required serialization and sometimes they have not.
There’s two ways that 3PLs are adapting. Luckily for us here at Cencora, we have an organization that specializes in looking ahead, and quality and compliance has always been a cornerstone. Right now, we’re trying to stay more dialed into the regulatory community than ever before. Our approach is that if a piece of potential regulation is being talked about, let’s get in front of that. The other strategy is working with third parties that specialize in those types of things on behalf of the 3PL.
Q. What differences do you see between the US and the EU pharma landscapes, and how do you make sure that you can support both regions seamlessly?
Cooksey: When you start talking about order flow and customer flow, there’s definitely a different rhythm within the European community versus here in the states. But when you start talking about the core tenets of a 3PL, we realize there’s a lot of commonality. As the only pharma-focused 3PL in the US and EU, some of the things that we’re really focusing on is trying to have a congruent quality system across our overall global network. We’ve been working on external visual tools where there’d be dashboards for our manufacturing partners to pull information regardless of what geography they’re in.
Q. How are 3PLs responding to increasing demand for cold chain solutions?
Cooksey: It starts with infrastructure. The footprint that we now have, what we call ultra cold -60C-80C, is at its highest level ever. So first you start to make the investments, then it’s really about how do you operationalize that? Product safety is paramount because obviously these therapies are extremely sensitive to temperature, so how are you going to handle, store, and then obviously ship those therapies?
Another complexity is having myriad different packouts that you may have to deploy to be able to support these programs. You’ve got your one-use coolers, but right now what’s coming on for green purposes is the multi-use coolers. And then cryo, which can be as low as -196°C, has a lot of different solutions out there. Just trying to understand the idiosyncrasies for each provider and how they want their coolers filled and handled has really been a very unique challenge.
Q. What are the latest digital transformation trends that you’re seeing shaping 3PL operations and technology investments?
Cooksey: At the moment it’s mainly about taking advantage of the AI technology that’s out there. 3PLs consume an amazing amount of data. You have myriad different clients and disease states that you support and this creates a very rich data set that we’re now using to give us some trends on what’s happening for a specific disease state or in a specific temperature range, for example.
One of the things that we’re trying to do with all this different information is create some benchmarks internally. As we speak to our clients, we can talk to them about what we’re seeing in our universe. And then for us, forecasting can be something that’s always been a little bit of a challenge, because we have so many different variations in our business. So bringing some of those data points together and creating some type of consistency and ability to predict what’s on the horizon has the potential to be very helpful.
As pharmaceutical supply chains become more complex, 3PLs are being asked to deliver far more than operational execution. From regulatory readiness and global quality alignment to advanced cold chain infrastructure and smarter use of data, the role of the 3PL is expanding alongside the needs of manufacturers and patients. For organizations like Cencora, staying ahead means continuing to invest in the capabilities, partnerships, and technology needed to support therapies wherever they are headed next.
To learn more about the latest trends in pharma logistics, download the following document.
