Where Most Pharma Companies Still Have Meaningful Gaps in Their Supply Chains: LogiPharma 2026

Pharmaceutical Executive spoke with Mark Talens, CCO of PAXAFE at LogiPharma 2026 in Boston. During the conversation., the executive discussed a variety of issues and updates on modern supply chains and the most important issues impacting them in today’s world.

Talens discussed how many companies haven’t properly organized their data in order to work best with modern technology. He also discussed broader organizational gaps in supply chains, citing many companies’ lack of cross-functional generalists as a significant issue.

Talens also detailed another major issue: the balancing of business-minded SOPs with real-world operations. While many companies think ahead to build in redundancies, they aren’t as prepared as they should be for certain real-world situations.

Pharmaceutical Executive: Where do most pharma corporations still have meaningful gaps in their supply chains?
Mark Talens: From experience, the challenge comes down first and foremost to organizational design. You may have deep domain expertise in logistics and in planning — but do you have the right next-generation expertise to connect and correlate across those domains? Do you have the generalists your organization needs? And critically, is your infrastructure actually ready to absorb these new tools?

What I mean by that is this: you can attach an AI tool to a twenty-year-old system. You see it happening everywhere — organizations experimenting with ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot. But if you have not organized your data foundation well and contextualized it first, you are going to struggle to find the benefits. And then it becomes what I call the trough of disillusionment. You say, "Well, it isn't working." And logically, it isn't working — because you need to properly prepare the environment, educate the organization, and set the stage before you can expect results.

There are real gaps here. Every company right now wants to move fast. They have a fear of missing out. But what I always recommend to our prospects and customers is this: don't move solely toward the shiny object. The shiny object will be different again in two years. We had blockchain, we had command sensors, we had control towers — and now we have AI, workflows, and agentic systems. Be ready first.

The approach we advocate is what we call organizing your data foundry first, then getting your harness in place — meaning defining the rule sets you want to work with. Only then do you start working with the advanced tools. And that does not mean it has to be a year-long project. Many toolsets, including ours at PaxSafe, can ingest data and work with it agnostically. Which brings me to another important principle: stay with agnostic toolsets. Do not attach yourself to a single brand or platform — it will limit you. Once your data is organized and your rule sets are defined, then you move to execution.