Why Clinical Supply Chain Fragmentation Is Now a Resilience Problem

Full interview summary

In a recent video interview with Applied Clinical Trials, Hal Green, senior solution architect and life sciences vertical lead EMEA at Loftware, discussed how supply chain fragmentation in clinical trials has evolved from a problem of inefficiency into a fundamental threat to trial continuity and resilience. He opened by reframing the core question sponsors are now asking—no longer whether they can run a trial, but whether they can run it while absorbing disruption and maintaining continuity—and tied that shift directly to the growing volatility of global, decentralized, and adaptive trial designs.

Green identified disconnected systems and siloed data as the root cause of the most common supply chain failures, using the analogy of an archipelago of islands to describe how fragmented environments obscure visibility and allow errors to propagate undetected until they become operationally painful. He noted that sponsors typically don't notice a change has gone wrong until the impact has already arrived—by which point quarantined shipments, re-labeling efforts, and trial delays are already in motion. Even minor changes, such as a font size adjustment on a container label, can cascade through a fragmented supply chain and erode the trust that patients and regulators depend on.

On geopolitical risk, Green argued that disruption must now be treated as an expected condition rather than an exceptional one, and that sponsors need to build optionality and real-time visibility into their supply chains so they can redirect, update, and adapt without rebuilding processes from scratch after every disruption.

He closed by pushing back on the buzzword-heavy framing that often surrounds supply chain resilience, arguing that the concept is only meaningful when it extends to people as well as systems. True resilience, he suggested, may now be a higher-order priority than compliance—not because compliance doesn't matter, but because without continuity, compliance cannot be sustained. The building blocks, he concluded, are interconnected systems and interconnected people working from a single, adaptable source of truth.