Q&A: Ryan Kelly on What Good Supply Chain Audits Look Like

At INTERPHEX 2026, PharmTech sat down with Ryan Kelly, interim CEO and senior director of Supply Chain Security and Brand Protection, Rx360, to explain why true supply chain visibility, smarter auditing, and quality alignment are critical to protecting patients.

Watch the 2-part video interview with Kelly:
Part 1: Ryan Kelly on Smarter Pharma Supply Chain Audits

Part 2: Ryan Kelly's Tips for Drug Supply Chain Protection

PT: What Is the Impact of Third-Party Audits?

Kelly: The results have been significant. We have case studies where we've saved millions of dollars simply by catching issues early. There's also a compounding benefit, when third-party audits are done well, they can reduce how frequently a company needs to be audited at all. That's a win on both sides. The supplier isn't constantly hosting audit teams, and the company doing the auditing saves on cost and resources. It becomes cheaper, more efficient, and more effective for everyone involved.

How Do You Prioritize What Gets Audited?

The reality is you can't audit everything. It comes down to risk stratification, focusing your most intensive scrutiny on the most critical areas, and using the third-party model to provide a right-sized level of assurance for areas that are lower risk. The goal is coverage without overkill.

What Is Changing About the Intersection of Quality and Supply Chain?

Historically, quality owned the manufacturing process, batch release, process controls. Supply chain focused on execution, coordination, and moving product. Those were largely siloed functions. At Rx360, we're actively working to break down that divide, because the truth is they are inseparable. How you move product through the supply chain, maintaining temperature, visibility, and control at every stage, directly impacts quality. We have to look at GMP and GDP holistically and build quality into supply chain design from the very beginning, not add it as an afterthought.

The most effective way to drive alignment is to work backwards from the patient. If every decision ties back to ensuring the patient receives a safe and efficacious dose, quality and supply chain teams naturally find shared purpose.

What Are the Most Common Mistakes You See Organizations Making?

One big mistake I see is a false sense of supply redundancy. A company will identify a primary supplier and a secondary supplier and feel confident they're protected. But when you dig deeper, you often find that the secondary supplier is sourcing their raw materials from the same place as the primary supplier. So if there's a supply disruption at that source, there is no reliable backup in your supply chain.

That's why supply chain mapping is so essential. You need to understand every single product, its full end-to-end flow, where your inventory sits at every node, and what could go wrong at each point. That includes geographic, regional, transportation, and financial risks within your supply base. It sounds straightforward, but many organizations genuinely don't have complete visibility into where their physical product is at any given time, from raw materials and APIs all the way through to final labeling and delivery to the customer.

In order to address these gaps organizations need to digitize where they can, audit against the highest international standards regardless of where you're operating, and build quality into your workflows from the start. You simply cannot add quality at the end. The organizations that understand that are the ones that will protect both their supply chain and their patients.