Beyond the plan: Navigating external disruption in Cold Chain logistics
Q: What kinds of “uncontrollable” external factors actually affect pharmaceutical cold chain operations?
There are three we deal with most often: geopolitical events, weather, and carrier or infrastructure problems.
Geopolitical events come first — including armed conflicts, airspace closures, compliance reviews of countries under sanctions, and sudden routing restrictions imposed by foreign regulators. These are the ones that move in hours and rewrite entire trade lanes overnight. A region you were flying through on Monday morning can be off-limits by Monday afternoon, and every shipment in transit becomes a separate recovery operation. The post-acquisition compliance environment has added another layer here, too. Shipments to certain destinations now require a formal compliance review before they can proceed, and the lead time has shifted from days to weeks. That’s not a delay — it’s a permanent change to how the lane operates, and the team has had to learn to plan around it.
Weather and climate are the second category. Winter storms are closing the Midwest interstates, hurricane season in the Gulf is in full swing, European heatwaves are shutting down ramp operations because tarmac temperatures exceed safe handling limits, and fog is grounding regional connections in Northern Europe. These events are predictable by season but unpredictable in severity. What’s changed in the last few years is that weather events are lasting longer. Storms that used to clear in a day now stall over major hubs for two or three days. That changes the maths for packaging selection and routing buffers.
The third category comprises carrier and infrastructure events — a major US gateway closing for a single day for a VIP visit, an airline removing capacity from a lane, a ground network freezing up due to a labour action that took drivers offline, or a customs system going down at a key port. People focus on the dramatic geopolitical stuff because it makes the news. Still, the real operational impact comes from the smaller events that happen weekly and never get reported anywhere outside the operations team handling them.
Q: Where in the supply chain are those impacts felt most?
The pressure usually starts with the route. When airspace closes or a gateway shuts down, the original flight plan can no longer be used, and the team has to rebuild the route in real time. In pharma, even a four-hour extension can create risk because containers and passive shippers are validated against specific transit profiles. If the shipment falls outside that window, it can become more than a delay. It can become a quality event.
Capacity changes quickly, too. When disruption hits, available carriers and drivers become scarce, so alternatives are usually more expensive. We saw this earlier this year with a 28-mile dry ice move in Iowa. Weather closed the local interstate, the nearest driver pool was unavailable, and the only option was to dispatch a driver from another city at six times the original quote. The same logic applies to larger lanes: when everyone is trying to avoid the same disruption, capacity disappears, and costs rise fast.
Documentation is the part that people often underestimate. When a shipment goes off plan, every decision needs to be clearly recorded, from flight changes to custody handovers to carrier communications. Without that record, claims become harder to support, charges are harder to challenge, and costs can fall on the wrong people. In a disruption, documentation is not just admin. It protects the shipment, the client, and the operation.
Q: How do you mitigate those impacts as they arise?
Most of the work happens before the disruption begins, because once a route is affected, the options become smaller very quickly.
In the US, our five-facility setup gives the team room to move across EWR, JFK, LAX, IAH, and ORD, so that one affected location does not leave us trying to solve everything from a single point. If a gateway closes or a local issue affects a single lane, we can consider another facility, route, or handover point while there is still time to protect the shipment.
Carrier planning works the same way because a major lane cannot depend on a single airline, and a key metro area cannot depend on a single ground partner. If capacity changes, a station closes, or a gateway is affected, the alternatives are already known, allowing the team to replan quickly rather than build a solution from scratch during the disruption.
A clear record is also part of mitigation, especially when decisions are made quickly and the shipment deviates from the original plan. Timestamps, flight numbers, custody changes, station updates, and carrier communications all need to be captured accurately because, if there is a claim, a force majeure discussion, or an extra charge to challenge, that record is what protects the operation.
Speed matters as well, but it is not only about reacting quickly. It is about getting the issue to the right people early enough to decide whether to hold, reroute, escalate, or move to another carrier before the situation becomes a bigger problem for the client.
So mitigation is really about having options ready before they are needed, and not relying on a single route, facility, carrier, or person to notice the problem only when it is too late.
Q: Anything you’d add for our readers?
One thing. The dramatic disruptions — wars, storms, airspace closures — grab headlines, but they account for perhaps 10 percent of the operational reality of running a pharmaceutical cold-chain network. The other ninety per cent is the small, daily friction: a delayed flight here, a closed road there, a carrier going non-responsive on a quote, a documentation gap caught at the last minute. The real measure of an operations team isn’t how it handles the big events everyone sees. It’s how few of the small ones turn into big ones in the first place. That’s the work, and it’s the part that doesn’t make the newsletter — but it’s the part that keeps patients on schedule with their medicines.