Pharma supplier diversification means little if every supplier uses the same airport

A biotech with suppliers in three countries can still have one airport. That is the trap Patrick Wohl, senior operations director for EMEA at Biocair, describes in a July 24 column for Pharmaceutical Commerce: a company spreads its supplier base across borders, then discovers that every one of those suppliers ships through the same hub or down the same air corridor.

Wohl's argument is that conventional risk management in pharma and biotech has looked mostly at suppliers and manufacturing sites, while disruption can land anywhere in the logistics network. His remedy, which he calls geopolitical supply chain mapping, extends the map to transportation corridors, airports, seaports, carrier networks, customs gateways, distribution centers and the infrastructure that supports them.

The stakes are specific to this sector. Many life sciences products are time-sensitive, temperature-controlled and expensive, Wohl writes, so a delay can reach back into research programs, clinical trials and manufacturing, and forward into whether a patient gets a therapy on schedule.

Where most supply maps stop

Most organizations know their direct suppliers well, according to Wohl, and know far less about the routes, hubs and carriers that carry material between them. Those dependencies stay invisible until something breaks. His example is the one above: apparent diversification across countries that collapses into a single air hub in practice.

That changes the unit of analysis. A supplier list is a list of companies; a logistics map is a list of lanes, and two lanes from two vendors can share a runway.

The academic literature has been slow to say how this kind of map should be built. A 2022 paper in the International Journal of Production Economics by Bart MacCarthy, Wafaa Ahmed and Guven Demirel found that most supply chain management research had avoided giving guidance on the mapping process, and that the phrase 'supply chain mapping' had become an umbrella term covering studies at very different levels of aggregation. The authors proposed a formal hierarchy of supply systems so a mapping study can state which level it is working at, identified the primary and secondary data sources that can feed a map, and flagged the significant difficulty of using them.

Read against that paper, Wohl's version is a deliberate choice of level: the logistics network rather than the tier-two supplier tree. For a clinical supply lead, the practical question that follows is a narrow one to put to a courier or forwarder: which airports and corridors do each of our qualified lanes actually depend on, and how many of them overlap.

Three reroutes that traveled faster than planning cycles

Wohl's point is that transport routes, not supplier lists, set the real exposure. When a major air or ocean corridor between Europe and Asia narrows for any reason, carriers reroute, and the effects are felt well beyond the region where the problem started. Each time, he writes, trouble in a single region quickly reshaped transport networks across the globe.

The pattern did not pause after his column ran. On Aug. 10, roughly two and a half weeks later, Pharmaceutical Commerce's Christopher Cole reported that freight risk for pharma supply chains was still climbing. Same lanes, fresh risk, inside a month.

What sits in the delayed container matters more than the delay itself. Wohl lists clinical trial materials, critical manufacturing components, biological samples and temperature-sensitive medicines as typical contents, and notes that even short disruptions can carry significant operational and financial consequences. The person who feels that first is the clinical site coordinator waiting on a temperature-controlled shipment that is now flying a longer way round.

Alternate routes have to be qualified before anyone needs them

Resilience, in Wohl's framing, starts well before a disruption. Mapping lets a company feed risk intelligence into logistics planning: pre-qualifying alternate routes and carriers, weighing cost and speed against robustness, and running structured scenario planning and stress tests against the map.

The cheapest, fastest lane and the most resilient lane are rarely the same lane, and the mapping exercise is what makes that trade-off visible to the CFO signing the freight budget. A pre-qualified alternate costs money in audits and paperwork before it ever carries a box. Wohl's case is that this spend belongs in planning, when the choice is deliberate, rather than in a scramble after a corridor closes.

He is also explicit that the map cannot be a one-time project. Geopolitical conditions, regulations and transport networks keep moving, so keeping the risk picture accurate requires continuous monitoring and regular review. Carrier networks are part of that churn: Pharmaceutical Commerce's Stephen Appezzato reported on Aug. 18 on IAG Cargo's addition of Kuala Lumpur to its cold chain network, the kind of change that is both a new option and a new dependency for anyone keeping a live map of qualified lanes.

For sponsors running multi-region trials with one qualified lane per site, this is the part of the column with the most direct bearing. For a company shipping domestically through a single 3PL, the corridor-level exposure Wohl describes may be far smaller, though the shared-hub question still applies to the inbound side.

The spreadsheet behind the map

A map is only useful if someone can query it when the news breaks. That is where a June 15 MD+DI piece by Abhijay Datta and Hemanth Holla picks up. Their typical scenario: a tariff revision or export restriction is announced and immediately exposes concentration in a critical API or component; planning, procurement and logistics teams pull data from disconnected systems, patch the inconsistencies and build manual scenarios in spreadsheets; senior decision-makers receive a consolidated view only after the disruption has already hit, and the window for mitigation has closed.

The pressure behind that scenario has a number attached. Gartner research cited by MD+DI found 42% of procurement leaders name supply disruptions as the most significant risk to their organization's success, with geopolitical issues, including tariffs and regulatory changes, ranking third.

Datta and Holla propose four capabilities in response: a unified, decision-grade data foundation; real-time risk sensing; dynamic scenario modeling; and semi-autonomous actions. The first pillar is the one that bears directly on Wohl's mapping. It means joining internal production, inventory, quality, logistics and procurement data with external signals on supplier health, regulatory shifts, trade policy, logistics constraints and macroeconomic indicators, on a governed platform that reflects how products, regions, suppliers and regulatory boundaries depend on one another. Logistics choke points, they note, are among the signals leading companies are adding as early indicators of disruption.

The authors also cite results from early movers. A vaccine manufacturer, unnamed in the piece, cut stockouts by 50% in a machine-learning forecasting pilot, and AI embedded in pharma operations workflows has delivered up to 15% better forecast accuracy, a 30% reduction in planning workload and 2-3% savings in supply chain costs, according to figures MD+DI attributes to outside references. Treat them as reference points rather than promises; they describe forecasting and planning, which is adjacent to route mapping, not identical to it.

Put the two pieces together and the relationship is clear enough. Wohl's map is the content, MD+DI's data layer is the container. A corridor map that lives in a slide deck is stale by the next quarter; one that lives in a governed data platform can be re-run when a strait closes.

MD+DI also lists what companies are actually doing under pressure: diversifying supply networks, regionalizing operations as governments push localization, and raising strategic inventory buffers. Which of those a firm reaches for is a capital question as much as a risk one, and neither source settles whether a bigger buffer is resilience or just stock tying up cash. A qualified alternate lane, at least, does not sit in a warehouse.

Who takes the call when a corridor closes

Visibility alone does not move a shipment. Wohl's closing point is that an effective response needs clear accountability for the decision, cross-functional coordination between the teams that hold the pieces, and experienced logistics partners able to manage chain of custody, regulatory requirements and temperature control while a reroute is under way.

None of this is new territory for the sector. The National Academies' 2022 report Building Resilience into the Nation's Medical Product Supply Chains observed that medical product supply chains resemble those of other goods in consisting of multiple stages carried out by different parties, and that serious vulnerabilities had been present in them for many years. What Wohl adds is a specific place to look: the hub, the corridor, the customs gateway that several suppliers quietly share.

The test of the argument is timing. Pharmaceutical Commerce ran the mapping case on July 24 and was reporting new Red Sea and Iran-related freight risk on Aug. 10. Whether the next route change lands on a pre-qualified alternate or on a spreadsheet opened after the fact is the difference the map is meant to make.