Senior Vice President of Global Supply Chain, Cencora

Brent Wilhelm

Brent Wilhelm, Cencora comments on cold chain pharma growth, a $1B supply chain investment, and a 2027 hub built to curb drug shortages.

Brent Wilhelm on Cold Chain Pharmaceuticals Reshape Storage and Shipping Needs

Access part 1 of this interview on why pharma supply chains still run on historical demand data and how AI could close the real-time visibility gap.

Access part 2 of this interview on last-mile drug delivery risks, carrier network visibility, weather disruptions, and how AI could improve routing.

In part 3 of a 3-part interview, Brent Wilhelm, Senior Vice President of Global Supply Chain, Cencora, examines the operational demands of specialty and cold chain pharmaceuticals, a segment he says is reshaping the industry's infrastructure needs. "70% of the new medicines being launched through this next year are in the specialty space," Wilhelm says, noting that more than half require cold chain handling, meaning packaging and storage capable of maintaining temperatures at 2 to 8 degrees Celsius or colder throughout transport. To meet that demand, Cencora has committed roughly $1 billion over the past year toward supply chain investments aimed at handling and shipping requirements more specialized than the industry has seen before.

Wilhelm also points to reimbursement pressure as a persistent, politically charged barrier shaping which products dispensers are willing to stock and administer. On the logistics side, he returns to the theme of building network nimbleness so product can flex to shifting demand, aided by AI and better data-sharing across the industry. He also cites external shocks, product shortages, geopolitical conflicts, and disease events like COVID-19, as reasons Cencora is rethinking inventory strategy.

That rethinking includes a new centralized distribution site focused on safety stock for critical inventories and medicines. "So we have inventory closest to the customer to serve the day-to-day, but we hold back a certain amount of inventory centrally so that we can ship that product dynamically across the country based on demand," Wilhelm explains.

Wilhelm’s comments point to a supply chain strategy built around flexibility: balancing regional inventory positioning with centralized reserves that can respond dynamically as specialty and cold chain demand continues to grow.

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Brent Wilhelm, Cencora, comments on cold chain pharma growth, a $1B supply chain investment, and a 2027 hub built to curb drug shortages.

Brent Wilhelm on Cold Chain Pharmaceuticals Reshaping Shipping Needs

Brent Wilhelm, Cencora talks on last-mile drug delivery risks, carrier network visibility, weather disruptions, and how AI could improve routing.

Can AI Fix Pharma's Last-Mile Delivery Blind Spot?

In part 2 of a 3-part interview, Brent Wilhelm, Senior Vice President of Global Supply Chain, Cencora, turns to the final mile: getting pharmaceuticals from the distribution network into the hands of practitioners and patients. Even when a therapy is in stock and positioned correctly, Wilhelm notes, delivery in the US typically depends on third-party carriers like FedEx and UPS, which introduces risk beyond Cencora's direct control. "And so where there's a larger risk is having visibility into the health of those networks," he says, pointing to the need to understand whether carriers can reliably pick up and deliver shipments on schedule.

That visibility gap becomes acute during disruptions. Wilhelm cites this past winter's Winter Storm Fern as a case in point: "Winter Storm Fern this past winter was a big issue in the southeast," he says, describing how the storm affected FedEx's Memphis hub and UPS's Louisville hub for days. Shipping from the geographically closest distribution site doesn't always make sense, he explains, if that carrier lane is experiencing latency or weather-related delays, which is why Cencora is exploring AI to consume real-time carrier data and route shipments through the healthiest available network path.

Wilhelm also highlights how delivery cadence varies by site of care. Some treatment centers need shipments once daily, others multiple times a day, and turnaround expectations range from next-day to two-day fulfillment depending on the therapy and practitioner. Managing that complexity, he says, requires both a flexible distribution footprint and the operational capability to support varied delivery methods simultaneously. Cencora's network of distribution sites is built to flex to those differing customer needs.

Together, the insights underscore a theme from Wilhelm's broader conversation: that resilient pharmaceutical delivery increasingly depends on combining real-time data with AI-driven decision-making, rather than relying solely on historical shipping patterns or proximity-based routing.

Brent Wilhelm, Cencora, talks on last-mile drug delivery risks, carrier network visibility, weather disruptions, and how AI could improve routing.

Brent Wilhelm, Cencora discusses why pharma supply chains still run on historical demand data and how AI could close the real-time visibility gap.

Brent Wilhelm on Why Drug Shortages Persist Despite Available Inventory

In part 1 of a 3-part interview, Brent Wilhelm, Senior Vice President of Global Supply Chain, Cencora, brings more than 30 years of healthcare industry experience to a role focused on getting pharmaceuticals from manufacturers to patients quickly, including specialty and temperature-controlled products, across both domestic and global networks.

Wilhelm explains that Cencora's US network relies on more than 25 distribution centers designed to place inventory close to customers based on anticipated demand, enabling delivery in a matter of hours. But that model runs into trouble when demand shifts unexpectedly, as it did during regional RSV outbreaks. "So when we have demand variability, moving inventory, although it's available somewhere in the network, it could be on the East Coast, but the demand's spiking on the West Coast," he says. Because repositioning inventory takes time, drugs can technically be in the supply chain yet unavailable where they're needed most.

The fix, Wilhelm argues, is closer integration between distributors and manufacturers so that real patient-level demand and dispensing data can inform planning decisions before shortages occur. That shift is increasingly urgent as treatments move toward more real-time administration and practitioners look to stock only what they need immediately rather than carrying inventory for future weeks. "The way that the supply chain is set up today across the US, it's much more of a historical demand, not a real time," he notes, pointing to a gap between how the system was built and how it now needs to function.

Wilhelm also sees artificial intelligence as essential to closing that gap, both for spotting demand signals in ordering patterns and for managing complexity around dosage strengths and formulations. A persistent blind spot, he says, is visibility into what's being dispensed at the point of care, a limitation Cencora is now discussing with larger customers as it works toward shared demand planning that protects supply chain resilience and patient safety.

Brent Wilhelm, Cencora, discusses why pharma supply chains still run on historical demand data and how AI could close the real-time visibility gap.

Brent Wilhelm

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