McKinsey on Healthcare
Warehouse to wellness: Bob Mauch on modern pharmaceutical distribution
05 Dec 2025
Cencora President and CEO Bob Mauch discusses the company’s role in delivering vital medicines to patients and the innovations it is deploying to cut the time it takes to bring treatments to bedsides.See www.mckinsey.com/privacy-policy for privacy information
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welcome you're listening to the mckinsey on healthcare podcast where we explore the ideas and issues shaping the future of healthcare i'm drew ungerman a senior partner and global leader of our social healthcare and public sector practices and also your host for today's episode
This particular episode is also being distributed in partnership with Modern Healthcare, a leading source of industry news. I'm joined by Bob Motch, President and CEO of Sancora. Bob took over as CEO in 2024, bringing more than 30 years of experience in pharmaceutical care to the organization.
Today, we'll be discussing some of the biggest challenges in healthcare, from ensuring access to affordable care and how the industry can better meet patients where they are, to the role of AI, digital tools, and other innovations shaping the future of healthcare. Bob, it's great to be with you today. Thank you so much for joining us.
Pleasure, Drew. Good to see you.
Well, Bob, I have a lot I wanted to cover with you today. It's no secret that the next decade will bring incredible specialty therapies like cell and gene treatments that require highly specialized handling. And frankly, it already has to a large extent. How is SYNCORA positioning itself to lead in this kind of an environment?
Yeah, Drew, it's one of the biggest things that we think about, actually. So if you think about our overall One of the things that would jump off a page if we were going to show a slide is our commitment to continue to lead in specialty. So that has a lot to do with the relationships that we have with manufacturers. It has a lot to do with the relationships that we have with providers.
But what's critically important is that we're continuously innovating on the service side. And that includes investments in our capabilities, in automation. And we've been doing that over a long period of time. So we opened a new specialty focused distribution center in California last year. We're building a new central distribution center.
We have a very specialized logistics capability in our world courier business, which is the highest end of all of that. So the cryogenic storage and transport for those cell therapies, gene therapies, where we're participating in really all of the clinical trials there, it's a lot about investment.
And our investment priorities, fortunately, guide us to internal investment and internal capabilities and I mentioned the physical capabilities and I mentioned automation, but a lot of that is driven by automation getting better through advanced analytics and AI to make sure that we're managing the inventory and products as best we can for the providers, patients, and the manufacturers.
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