Turn Supply Chain Data Into Decisions Before Shortages Reach Patients, Says RELEX’s Rohit Tripathi

Biopharma companies have spent years building data systems across manufacturing, suppliers, logistics, and quality. The harder problem now is acting on that data before a disruption becomes a shortage. In the second part of a two-part interview with BioPharm International®, Rohit Tripathi, vice president of industry strategy, consumer packaged goods, and manufacturing at RELEX Solutions, said patient supply is the ultimate test of resilience.

“Resilience becomes real when the patients and the hospitals continue receiving treatment, continue receiving medicines, even as the supply chain changes,” Tripathi said.

In the first part of the interview, Tripathi discussed what is driving reshoring decisions, how annual reviews of the USMCA complicate sourcing for biologics, and how to distinguish short-term disruptions from structural ones. In this installment, he turned to cold-chain visibility, the role of AI in planning, and how companies should measure whether their supply chains are working.

Where are biopharma supply chains still falling short?

For temperature-sensitive products such as biologics and cell and gene therapies, Tripathi sees the biggest planning gaps “at handoffs between organizations and systems.” Each party holds a different piece of the picture:

• manufacturers know their production schedules
• logistics providers monitor location, temperature, and other ambient conditions
• quality teams know whether a lot can be released
• distributors manage the networks downstream

“The challenge, though, is these views are often not connected to the same inventory and demand plan,” he said.

Suppose a shipment reaches its destination on time, but its sensors show a temperature excursion. Quality must then assess the product against approved conditions to confirm the medicine is still stable, and planners need to know which lots were affected and why. Getting that done in real time, “connected to the right decision and the named owner, is the biggest gap that I see,” Tripathi said.

Asked what supply chain leaders should fix in the next year, Tripathi said the biggest opportunity is to turn supply chain information into decisions before disruptions lead to shortages that affect patients and hospitals. The data itself is not the constraint, he said. “Given all the investments we have made over the last two decades, I don’t think we lack data in manufacturing, in our supplier base, in our shipments, in our warehouses, quality systems.”

Getting the right information to the right team early used to mean building complex business analytics applications to surface patterns. AI can now do that work faster and produce initial responses or recommendations, Tripathi said.

The regulated nature of biopharma still demands a human in the loop. “We still need to make sure that we are holding humans accountable and not pawning off that decision to AI,” he said.

He pointed to RELEX’s 2026 State of the Supply Chain report on this point. In that survey, 54% of leaders preferred AI to make recommendations while humans finalize decisions, and only 10% said they would trust AI to make fully independent supply chain decisions.

Tripathi closed by stepping back from metrics. Once the talk about KPIs, manufacturing excellence, and Six Sigma is done, he said, the real measure is whether patients keep receiving their medicines. “That to me is the ultimate measure of like is your supply chain effective or not,” he said. “Domestic production can help, but so can better monitoring.”

Watch the first part of the interview here.

About the Speaker

Rohit Tripathi, VP of Industry Strategy, Consumer Packaged Goods, and Manufacturing at RELEX

Rohit Tripathi specializes in supply chain operations, business transformation and applying AI to improve planning, resilience and operational performance. His work at RELEX includes helping manufacturers, including those managing complex, temperature-sensitive supply chains in industries such as pharmaceuticals, strengthen planning and visibility amid disruption. With more than 25 years of global experience across the U.S., India, Brazil and Europe, Rohit has led international teams delivering AI-enabled solutions for supply chain, IoT and customer experience.