The Real Cold Chain Problem Isn’t Visibility — It’s Your Approach

"If I had an hour to solve a problem, I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions."
— Einstein

Cute quote. But here’s the truth: in pharma logistics, we already spent those 55 minutes. We listened to quality teams buried in PDFs. We watched billions wasted on “visibility solutions”. We reflected on our own pharma scars.

And here’s what became obvious: the industry defined the problem at the surface level and thought that was good enough.

That’s why programs stall. That’s why lanes don’t scale. That’s why billions later, losses haven’t gone down.

And for many visibility providers still clinging to the surface definition… time is almost up.

The Industry’s Myth of Visibility (and the Brick Wall You Built)

The myth goes: If we just deploy more trackers and dashboards, we’ll solve product loss.

But that’s surface-level thinking. And the reality is this: you built yourself a brick wall.

• Too many systems. Teams juggling 5+ logins — IoT portals, passive logger portals, courier dashboards, carrier milestones, QMS. Adoption collapses.
• Crappy alarms & predicting. Device alerts without context are a terrible proxy for risk. False positives. False negatives. And suddenly you’re back to paying $200+ per shipment for manual monitoring. Bad shipments slip through.
• Lack of insights. Without connecting planning to execution, no big-ticket changes happen: packaging optimization, air-to-ocean shifts, SLA enforcement. No ROI, no executive support, programs stall.
• Even when you had insights… deploying them was too slow. Validation dragged on so long that changes never got implemented. The data told you what to fix, but the fix never happened.

Surface-level problem definition leads to surface-level outcomes.

The Real Problem: The Overlooked Transportation Lifecycle

The issue was never “visibility.” The issue is a broken product transportation lifecycle — and your conventional approach overlooked it.

• Planning: Lane qualifications, SOPs, and risk assessments are static, paper-heavy, and disconnected from reality.
• Visibility: Data scattered across platforms, no single source of truth.
• Monitoring: Reliance on device alerts = noise, fatigue, missed risk, wasted money.
• Product Release: Manual, labor-heavy, 7–10 days to disposition.
• Insights: No continuous feedback loop between planned SOPs and actual lane performance.

These aren’t isolated pain points. They’re interconnected symptoms of a system that’s never been orchestrated end-to-end.

The Cost of Defining the Problem at the Surface

This is why billions invested in visibility haven’t reduced losses.

Because the problem was defined too shallowly, you missed the depth:

• Quality teams still buried in spreadsheets.
• Planning still divorced from execution.
• Trade-off decisions still guesses.
• $40B+ in pharma losses every year still staring you in the face.

Surface-level definitions = surface-level solutions.

Reframing: The Real Problem Is Orchestration

What’s needed isn’t more dots on a map. It’s orchestration.

Orchestration means building a flywheel where every stage reinforces the next:

1. Start with planning. Digitize and centralize your lane qualifications, SOPs, and risk models. This isn’t just about storing documents — it’s about creating a living baseline of what “good” looks like.
2. Move into execution. Shipments aren’t judged by generic device alerts anymore. They’re monitored against the actual parameters you set in planning — stability budgets, packaging, vendor SLAs, validated routes. Alerts and recommendations are contextual, not noisy.
3. Feed live results back into planning. Every shipment becomes a learning loop. Deviations, interventions, and vendor performance flow back into the central plan. Actuals update your SOPs and lane profiles automatically, tightening the gap between design and reality.

That’s the flywheel: plan → execute → refine → repeat. The deeper you run it, the faster it spins. And with every turn, the system compounds value — fewer excursions, optimized packaging, smarter modal shifts, stronger vendor accountability, lower monitoring costs.

Orchestration isn’t about watching shipments. It’s about continuously improving the entire lifecycle.

Closing: Owning the Definition

Einstein was right: But pharma never truly defined the problem. It thought it could get away with spending 55 minutes on implementing solutions.

If this sounds like what you’re dealing with. The problem isn’t visibility. The problem is your approach.

At PAXAFE, we didn’t stop at the surface. We dug deeper, mapped the symptoms and disconnects, and built the flywheel that finally ties it all together.

If your visibility program has stalled, if your lanes never scaled, if ROI never materialized — you’re not alone. But you don’t have to stay there.