PAXAFE’s Mark Talens: Supply Chain Teams Must Shift From Firefighters to Orchestrators

Mark Talens, chief commercial officer at PAXAFE, says organizations tend to follow a familiar script when they set out to change. Processes and people need to evolve, so the instinct is to shop for a new system. But new technology built on old processes rarely changes outcomes. Speaking with Pharmaceutical Commerce at LogiPharma USA 2026, where he joined a keynote panel on end-to-end supply chain visibility, Talens notes that supply chain teams are skilled at reacting to problems and chasing them down.

"Supply chain people are normally the best firefighters in the world," he says. "I need them to change to proactive orchestrators."

Getting there takes new tools, but more data alone won't do it. Talens points to the early control tower model: one person facing five or six screens, with more information but no better equipped to act on it. Without context, he says, added data can amplify disruption much like the bullwhip effect. That context comes from sound processes and the right data correlated in real time. In his view, the first step is defining the use cases to solve, then aligning process, system and organizational change around them. Bolting technology onto existing operations, won't make a difference.

Shared visibility also widens the scope of cold chain. Talens describes it not as a logger riding along in a shipment but as a conditional chain of custody spanning temperature, shock, tilt, humidity and geofencing. He says roughly 60% of a product's allowable time out of refrigeration is used up in manufacturing. That makes excursions a supply chain-wide issue rather than only a distribution one.

The decision-making payoff comes when those signals are correlated with stability studies and lane, route and cost data. Today, a two-hour excursion may fall well within a product's stability profile, yet supply chain can't act until quality reviews it, which can take days or weeks. With real-time visibility, an agentic workflow can generate a disposition while the product keeps moving. For advanced therapies, Talens says, that speed to decision protects patients, not just margins.

Watch the previous part of his interview:

1. Supply Chain Visibility Needs Context Before AI, Says PAXAFE’s Mark Talens