Gregg Gorniak on Turning DSCSA Compliance Investment Into Shared Value

DSCSA compliance investments only create value when trading partners agree on what "value" actually means, and that alignment is harder to reach than it sounds, according to Gregg Gorniak, vice president, manufacturer operations and data services and secure supply chain lead at Cencora. Speaking with Pharmaceutical Commerce ahead of his session at HDA's 2026 Traceability Seminar, "Transforming DSCSA Compliance Into Strategic Growth and Innovation," Gorniak draws on his experience on both the manufacturer and wholesaler sides of the law to explain where partners find common ground on turning compliance into shared value, and where that common ground erodes. In the third installment of his interview with Pharmaceutical Commerce, he lays out what alignment looks like in practice.

Gorniak points to bundling, the informal packaging layer between eaches and cases, as a clear example. DSCSA's aggregation requirements stop at the each, case and pallet level, but some operations rely on an additional bundled or inner-pack tier to accommodate automation that cannot process individual units. When that bundle is serialized and shared through EPCIS, he explains, it can turn a job requiring a dozen or more scans into just two, a difference that adds up to substantial labor savings at a wholesaler’s volume. However, because bundling falls outside the law's requirements, its adoption depends entirely on whether the economics pencil out for every party involved, not just the one capturing the efficiency gain.

That asymmetry, Gorniak says, is where alignment most often breaks down: a capability that saves one partner time and cost may be a pure expense for another, with no requirement of law to force the investment. Closing that gap, he argues, comes down to ongoing, direct conversations between trading partners rather than assuming shared benefit will emerge on its own.

Watch the previous installments of Gorniak’s interview with PC:

1. Cencora's Gregg Gorniak on Using AI to Get Ahead of DSCSA Data Gaps
2. The Difference Between Meeting DSCSA and Mastering It