Cencora's Brent Wilhelm on Closing the Final-Mile Visibility Gap

In part 2 of a 3-part interview with our sister publication PharmTech, Cencora's senior vice president of global supply chain, Brent Wilhelm, shifts the conversation from inventory positioning to the last leg of the journey: moving product out of the distribution network and into the hands of practitioners and patients.

A therapy can be in stock and staged at the right facility and still run into trouble once it leaves the warehouse. That's because, in the US, last-mile delivery largely rides on third-party carriers such as FedEx and UPS — partners whose networks sit outside Cencora's direct control. "Where there's a larger risk is having visibility into the health of those networks," Wilhelm says.

Nowhere did that risk show up more clearly than during a weather event Wilhelm points to from earlier this year. "Winter Storm Fern this past winter was a big issue in the southeast," he says, recalling how the storm knocked out normal operations at FedEx's Memphis hub and UPS's Louisville hub for several days. The episode illustrates a counterintuitive point: routing a shipment through the nearest distribution site isn't always the fastest option if that carrier's lane is bogged down by weather or congestion. It's this kind of scenario that has Cencora testing AI models capable of ingesting live carrier data and automatically rerouting shipments to whichever network path is actually clear.

Delivery expectations aren't uniform across the customer base, either, Wilhelm points out. Some sites of care need a single delivery a day; others require multiple runs. Turnaround windows swing from next-day to two-day, depending on the drug and the practitioner ordering it. Meeting that range of needs, he says, takes more than a wide distribution footprint, it requires the operational flexibility to run several delivery models at once.

The throughline across Wilhelm's remarks: shoring up pharmaceutical delivery now hinges less on historical shipping patterns or simple proximity, and more on pairing real-time network data with AI to make routing calls on the fly.

Watch the first installment of Wilhelm’s interview with PharmTech:

1. Cencora's Brent Wilhelm on the Inventory Paradox Behind Drug Shortages