How Co-Creation Drives Successful Pharma Supply Chain Solutions

According to Tina Martinez, vice president and head of global products and solutions at Cencora, the wholesaler occupies a distinctive position within the global healthcare ecosystem, operating at the center of the pharmaceutical supply chain with a scale that extends well beyond the United States. As a global organization, the company is able to leverage its international reach to address complex challenges facing manufacturers, providers, and other healthcare stakeholders across diverse markets.

Central to this effort is Cencora’s global products and solutions team, which works across the entire enterprise to identify opportunities for innovation and to bring new products and services to market. The team’s mandate is focused on solving customers’ most pressing challenges—whether those relate to evolving market dynamics, operational complexity, or the need for greater efficiency across the supply chain.

Collaboration is a foundational element of Cencora’s approach. The company has long emphasized a customer-first philosophy that is embedded at every level of the organization, from executive leadership to frontline teams that engage with customers daily. These deep, long-standing relationships—many of which span 10 to 20 years—enable Cencora to work closely with partners to co-develop solutions that are both practical and forward-looking.

By innovating alongside customers rather than in isolation, Cencora is able to respond more effectively to shifts in the healthcare landscape, including changes in regulation, distribution models, and global demand. This collaborative model helps drive greater efficiency throughout the supply chain while ensuring that new solutions are aligned with real-world needs.

Ultimately, Cencora’s role at the intersection of global scale, supply chain expertise, and customer collaboration positions the company to not only improve operational performance, but also contribute to broader healthcare goals. By bringing thoughtful, scalable solutions to market, the company aims to support more resilient supply chains and, most importantly, help create healthier futures for patients worldwide.

She also shared her your philosophy and typical process for partnering with pharma manufacturers to co-create and pilot a new solution; how advanced solutions translate into measurable, quantifiable benefits; and much more.

A transcript of his conversation with PC can be found below.

PC: Can you detail your philosophy and typical process for partnering with a pharmaceutical manufacturer to co-create and pilot a new solution, from the late-stage clinical phase through commercial launch?

Martinez: One of the key pieces is really spending time with our manufacturer customers, listening, engaging with them. We attend conferences, we sit in on many meetings with them, and we really take an outside approach, so active listening. What are the challenges they're trying to solve daily, and how can we potentially support them sitting at the center of supply chain where we do? Really thinking through also all of the assets we have within our enterprise.

We really have an end-to-end solution in bringing new drugs to market and getting them all the way to the patient, so I think active listening is key. And again, just having those relationships where they feel confident in sharing some of their challenges with us and really working together to solve those. If we can't truly define and validate what the core problem is, we can't build a solution around it, because no one's going to utilize it.

I mean, we can come up with solutions all day long, but if we're not doing it with a customer, we're not going to be successful. So really thinking through everything starts and ends with customer feedback, and once we have identified a potential product or a solution, it’s really important to pilot that with the customer and have a user feedback loop so we continuously iterate on the product to ensure this is exactly what they're looking for.

One example of that is a dedicated virtual warehouse. This is a solution that was developed based on feedback from upstream customers, downstream customers on really wanting more transparency and visibility into the supply chain. This solution, which we're piloting today, allows for virtual sequestration of products for a customer. When we started this work, we had a completely different solution in mind, but went back to the basics again of really defining and validating that problem. We recognize that if we're going to be successful in building this solution, it can't be a manual process.

We started to work on a new technology platform that allows for virtual sequestration in our distribution centers. That took almost two years, and a lot of people to work through that, but we now have all of our pilot customers on this technology platform, and it went very smoothly, which I would say is pretty rare when we're working with new technology platforms. But it went very smoothly, and we've also learned that we can leverage this technology platform to continue to build new products and solutions on top of this. So that's one example where, again, when you think about our process and how we work, it’s really listening and working with the customer to bring it to life together.