Navigating Pharma Logistics: Trends, Challenges, and Solutions for 2025

Andreas Gmür

18.10.2024

Reading Time: 5 Min.

This blog post is based on a masterclass series created in cooperation with Alpega. The full, in-depth content of the masterclass video series can be accessed here.

The pharmaceutical industry is undergoing a transformation, driven by emerging therapies, stricter regulations, and growing market complexity. These shifts place enormous pressure on logistics to deliver sensitive, high-value products like personalized medicines, biologics, and vaccines safely and efficiently. In this dynamic landscape, companies must adapt to new logistics challenges while staying compliant with global standards.

Trends: Evolving Pharma Market

Pharma companies focus on resilience and sustainability. They face challenges from limited growth in mature markets, complex logistics for personalized medicines, and stricter regulatory requirements demanding greater traceability across the supply chain.

Resilience & Sustainability: In today’s global supply chains, interruptions of logistics networks caused by factors such as wars, strikes, and weather conditions have become the new norm. While companies previously focused on understanding the possible risks and the mitigation actions linked to these, the approach has shifted towards actively managing the resilience of the network. In this approach, companies seek to identify the critical elements in terms of customer service impact and the duration of such an impact in a network by simulating thousands of scenarios and focusing proactive mitigations on the most vulnerable elements. Besides balancing costs, service and capital, companies now need to continuously consider two additional optimization levers in logistics solutions: resilience and sustainability.
Mature markets versus emerging markets: Many established pharma companies experience limited growth in mature markets (e.g. Europe and North America) with their traditional medicines. As these companies expand into emerging markets with these products, they face the challenge of maintaining service quality by finding adequate logistics infrastructure and solutions.
Personalized products & rare diseases: In mature markets, growth is driven mainly by new medicines such as treatments for rare diseases and personalized medicines. This growing trend introduces smaller, highly sensitive shipments with complex storage requirements.
Increasing regulatory requirements: Regulatory bodies enforce stringent guidelines for Good Distribution Practices (GDP) and Good Storage Practices (GSP) to prevent counterfeits and ensure patient safety. These regulations demand greater traceability throughout the supply chain, from the manufacturing site to the point of care, creating more operational complexity for logistics.

Challenges: New Requirements for Pharma Logistics

The pharma market trends impact logistics with a shift to smaller, higher-value shipments and new temperature requirements.

New temperature solutions: Temperature requirements for pharma are increasing due to new temperature ranges for products and stricter regulatory requirements. For instance, the increasing demand for frozen transport solutions between -60°C and -80°C (dry ice) and cryogenic transport solutions, with temperatures as low as-197°C (liquid nitrogen) for therapies like CAR-T cell treatments, is reshaping the logistics landscape. Many new temperature-controlled solutions for transports (passive and active) have evolved in the last year. As sustainability is becoming more important, sustainable, reusable materials, return logistics, and overall CO2 emissions play an important role in designing the right solutions.
New stakeholders: The complexity of pharma logistics is growing for patient-centric and personalized medicine due to additional services and stakeholders being involved. Many supply chains are shifting to a batch-size of one and a closed-loop supply chain (starting with the patient and ending with the patient). While in the past, distributors, wholesalers, and pharmacies were the main interfaces for logistics, now clinics, doctors, patient organizations, insurance companies and many more stakeholders play an additional integral role in the logistics solutions for personalized medicine. Completely new logistics solutions are needed that combine treatments and deliveries, for example, homecare treatments and direct-to-patient deliveries.
Tracking requirements grow together: Different traceability and tracking requirements exist in supply chains. Whether it’s to ensure the correct temperature conditions during transportation and storage, guarantee timely arrival at patients, avoid counterfeits with serialization of products, or ensure better treatment outcomes with patient-centric monitoring, these tracking capabilities need to merge while ensuring the confidentiality of personal patient data.

Solutions: Pharma Logistics Solution Trends for 2025 and Beyond

Different solution approaches and elements help address new pharma logistics requirements.

Control Towers combining supply chain planning and execution: A centralized control tower organization and system provide an overarching view of the entire supply chain, enabling proactive management of disruptions, enhancing operational efficiency, and ensuring compliance with regulatory standards. By integrating logistics with supply chain planning, companies can better manage risks, forecast demands, and optimize transport routes.
Visibility and Traceability platforms: Real-time tracking and digital platforms are now essential for ensuring the safety of high-value shipments. Integrated platforms that offer real-time monitoring of temperature, location, and handling can prevent spoilage and damage, particularly in cold chain logistics.
Active management of inbound: Pharma companies are increasingly expanding oversight and logistics capabilities to inbound processes to ensure overall resilience in the supply chain and better control over this first leg of their supply chain.
Supply Chain coordination platforms and solutions: With personalized medicine gaining prominence, pharma companies need to accommodate the orchestration of the overall supply chain and logistics processes, starting from planning the patient treatments with doctors and patients, coordinating the different transports, and managing the manufacturing scheduling and processes. These networks must be flexible enough to adjust to low and fluctuating volumes while maintaining high service levels.

Conclusion: The Future of Pharma Logistics

As the pharmaceutical industry continues to evolve, the complexity of logistics operations will only increase. Companies that invest in cutting-edge technology, establish integrated logistics networks, and focus on sustainability will be better positioned to meet the industry’s growing demands. The ability to handle smaller, high-value shipments and temperature-sensitive products while maintaining visibility, compliance, and flexibility will be key differentiators for leading pharma logistics providers in 2025 and beyond.

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