The Inside Track: What’s Impacting the Pharma Supply Chain in Real Time?

Not too long ago, shipment oversight was largely reactive, with most teams checking the status only at final delivery or when a disruption occurred.

COVID was a watershed moment, and the world has since changed.

I work with pharma and life science companies every day at Tive, and the shift I’m seeing is real: teams are moving from reactive firefighting to proactive, data-driven control. They’re breaking down silos, and they’re putting patients at the center of supply chain decisions.

What follows are five new trends and developments defining pharma supply chains, stories from customers who’ve transformed their operations, and a practical starting point if you’re ready to make real-time shipment visibility a priority.

5 Key Industry Trends & New Developments in Pharma Logistics

Pharma supply chains today bear little resemblance to what they looked like a decade ago, and the pandemic accelerated a transformation that's now fully underway. Competitors are collaborating, data is flowing across once-siloed systems, and a new generation of advanced therapies is demanding capabilities the industry is still racing to build.

Every trend I’m about to walk through ties back to one thing: the need for reliable, real-time, actionable data. Without it, nothing else works.

1. Competition Becomes Collaboration: A New Networked Ecosystem

Pharma companies used to treat their logistics networks like state secrets. Then COVID hit.

Suddenly, Pfizer needed help from the same carriers working with Moderna. Airlines, 3PLs, governments, and NGOs found themselves communicating more regularly to figure out how to get vaccines into remote areas with little to no cold chain infrastructure. And those relationships outlasted the emergency.

Shared infrastructure and alliances built under pressure became permanent fixtures because everyone learned the same lesson at once: no single company, no matter how large, can manage today’s complexity alone.

2. Data Integration & Information Sharing Across the Supply Chain

Once you’re collaborating, you need to share information. That sounds obvious now, but five years ago, asking a freight forwarder to open their data to a manufacturer would’ve seemed absurd.

Today, APIs stitch together systems across manufacturers, 3PLs, airlines, and specialty carriers. Real-time shipment status, temperature readings, and location pings. Everyone sees the same picture instead of waiting for a PDF summary three days after delivery. And when everyone sees the same picture, problems get solved before they compound.

3. IoT, 5G & the Move from “After-the-Fact” to Real Time

The old way: toss a USB logger into a shipment, forget about it, plug it into a computer when the box arrives, and discover your product spent six hours outside a safe temperature range somewhere over the Atlantic. Throw the product away and lose the revenue.

The new way: connected sensors streaming temperature, humidity, shock, and location data in real time. 5G networks and other new forms of connectivity make that transmission fast and reliable enough to act on. Now, when something goes wrong mid-transit, teams can reroute, escalate, or recover while the shipment is still moving.

We’ve moved from discovering issues after the fact to addressing them as they happen.

4. The Rise of Cell & Gene Therapy & Personalized Medicine

Small-molecule drugs dominated pharma for decades. Biologics raised the bar. Cell and gene therapies changed the game entirely.

We’re talking about treatments built from a specific patient’s own cells, modified, then returned to that same patient. Get the identity wrong, and you’re not dealing with a dosing mistake: a patient could be fatally harmed by giving them another person’s cells. These therapies travel at cryogenic temperatures, around -196°C, with handling requirements that tolerate no mistakes.

C&GT volumes remain small for now. But a single CAR-T dose is still hard to afford. These treatments will never scale or become accessible unless the supply chain performs perfectly.

The logistics aren’t just a supporting function anymore. They’re a key player.

5. Predictive Analytics & AI: From Visibility to Intelligence

Knowing where your shipment is solves half the problem. Knowing where trouble will strike before it happens? That’s the other half.

Yes, public map data can estimate travel times, but the pharma supply chain needs something sharper: models trained on lane-specific, carrier-specific history that predict delays and risks with true accuracy.

We’ve fortunately entered an era where AI is starting to fill that gap, flagging high-risk shipments and recommending actions before problems materialize.

As a result, the question pharma teams ask is evolving from “What happened?” to “What’s about to happen, and how do we stop it?”

How Tive Fits into the Picture: Firsthand Experience From Industry Experts

So where does Tive fit into all of this? We are a leading real-time visibility player in global pharma logistics, which means we have a front-row seat to every trend I just walked through.

Here is what makes us unique: we pair live tracking with a control tower team that monitors shipments around the clock, and directly intervenes when things go sideways.

Visibility alone is merely expensive observation. The value comes from turning data into action. A few stories from the field will show you what I mean.

Proactive No Longer Passive: Real-Time Monitoring + Control Tower

For decades, pharma companies attached a data logger to a shipment, crossed their fingers, and checked the readout after delivery. If something went wrong at hour six of a 72-hour journey? Too late. You found out at hour 73, staring at a temperature excursion report and a pallet of ruined products.

Tive trackers stream temperature, location, and condition data throughout transit, and our 24/7 monitoring team watches it all unfold live. When they spot trouble, they don’t just send a report. They pick up the phone, contact carriers, alert customers, and coordinate recovery efforts while the shipment is still in motion.

Customers end up with fewer write-offs, cleaner compliance records, and documented proof of proactive risk management.

Saving a €25M Shipment: Airport Misplacement Case Study

One of our customers shipped a temperature-sensitive pallet worth around €25 million. The product needed to stay between +2°C and +8°C. Due to a mistake during handling at the international airport, that pallet got moved into a -20°C freezer. Classic misplacement, and the kind of thing that usually ends with a significant financial loss and a lot of difficult conversations.

Our team caught the temperature drop within minutes. They called the customer, contacted the airport, and provided exact location data so staff could locate the pallet and move it before the product froze solid.

Twenty-five million euros, rescued. No write-off. No disruption to patient supply. The difference came down to seeing the problem in real time, and having people empowered to fix it.

Exposing Risky Routing: The “Wandering Truck” in Europe

A forwarder we work with planned a shipment from Denmark to Istanbul by road. The route and timeline were agreed upon in advance. Then the real-time tracking data started showing something strange. The truck popped up in Vienna. Then Paris. Neither city made any sense given the plan.

What happened? A third-party transport provider decided to optimize their loads by rerouting through multiple cities, picking up and dropping off cargo along the way. Needless to say, something like this puts temperature-controlled pharma products—sitting in a truck with doors swinging open at every stop—at grave risk.

When the forwarder raised the issue, the provider denied everything. Then we pulled up the Tive data: GPS coordinates, timestamps, full route history. It’s hard to argue with concrete evidence.

The provider ultimately changed their practices, and the forwarder now has real accountability built into their carrier relationships.

Enabling Safe, Scalable Cell & Gene Therapy Logistics

Cell and gene therapies push pharma supply chains harder than any life sciences innovations that came before. Cryogenic storage at -196°C. Absolute chain-of-custody requirements. Zero room for identity errors, because mixing up patient A’s cells with patient B’s cells can prove fatal.

I spend time in industry work groups focused on solving these challenges. Tive’s solutions help maintain chain-of-custody and chain-of-identity integrity throughout transit.

The bigger picture here matters, too: if the logistics can’t perform at this level, these therapies will not scale and will remain at limited availability due to high cost. Getting the supply chain right is what opens the door to broader patient access.

Building Predictive, AI-Driven Risk Models With Real Data

Everything I’ve described so far is reactive, even if it happens fast. The next frontier is prediction: knowing where problems will emerge before they happen.

The industry is moving toward predictive intelligence—and Tive is helping lead that shift. The technology we're building will enable freight forwarders and manufacturers to develop predictive models using historical shipment performance, carrier behavior patterns, and real-time conditions. Instead of estimates, they'll get accurate ETAs. They'll see which lanes and partners consistently have issues. And they'll make smarter choices about routing and carrier selection for their most critical shipments. 

The pharma companies that figure this out will pull ahead—and everyone else will spend the next decade catching up.

So What Comes Next?

After five years of disruption, the pharma supply chain looks completely unrecognizable from the era of siloed teams, after-the-fact data, and crossed fingers.

When you’re moving life-saving drugs and therapies that are highly sensitive—not only to temperature but to mishandling of any kind— the only thing that works is collaboration across partners, visibility that happens in real time, and the ability to act before problems turn into losses. I see this every day, working with pharma and life science companies around the world. 

Tive exists to make that kind of supply chain possible. Our platform pairs live shipment tracking with a team that monitors shipments 24/7, and intervenes the moment something goes wrong. We help manufacturers, 3PLs, and carriers break down data silos, build shared visibility, and hold every handoff accountable.

Whether you’re protecting a €25 million pallet from a freezer mishap, building logistics infrastructure for personalized medicine, or simply trying to nip cargo theft in the bud, we can help you do it.

If you’re ready to see what proactive looks like, let’s talk. Get started with Tive today.