We meet Peter Bennett, Senior Vice President of Global Operations at Cardinal Health and Kinaxis‘ President of Global Commercial Operations, Mark Morgan at Kinexions 2026 in Las Vegas, to discuss how advanced scenario planning, AI and digital workers are helping one of healthcare’s largest distributors shift from reactive firefighting to proactive orchestration, thus improving service levels while keeping critical products flowing to patients…
For Cardinal Health, the supply chain is not simply about moving products efficiently from A to B. It is about ensuring a surgeon has the right device in theatre, a pharmacist has access to critical medicines and, ultimately, that patients receive the care they need when they need it. That reality has fundamentally reshaped how the healthcare giant thinks about planning, visibility and decision-making.
Cardinal Health occupies a unique position within the healthcare ecosystem. Headquartered in Dublin, Ohio, the company distributes pharmaceuticals and medical products to hospitals, pharmacies, ambulatory surgery centres and healthcare providers across the United States and internationally. With tens of thousands of employees and an extensive distribution network, its supply chain supports the delivery of products that healthcare professionals rely upon every day. In that environment, supply chain failures carry consequences far beyond financial performance. “A life science supply chain is regularly tested every day and the complexities that exist are global in scale,” says Peter Bennett, Senior Vice President of Global Operations at Cardinal Health, backstage at Kinexions 2026 in Las Vegas.
Bennett is joined by Mark Morgan, President of Global Commercial Operations at Kinaxis and the pair are keen to explain how the healthcare organisation has transformed its approach to supply chain execution. And their message is clear. In a world defined by disruption, speed has become the new currency.
Proactive not reactive
Prior to its work with Kinaxis, Cardinal Health relied on a patchwork of spreadsheets and disconnected systems to manage operations. “What we tried to do prior to our engagements with Kinaxis was pull all that together leveraging Excel and tools that were disparate across our entire ecosystem,” Bennett explains. “So, we needed something to pull everything together, a glue, if you will.”
The timing proved critical. Cardinal Health began working with Kinaxis approximately four years ago, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, when unprecedented disruption exposed weaknesses in traditional planning processes. “We’d started during the pandemic with a real lack of visibility within our inventory and a lack of ability to scenario plan in any meaningful way without conducting weeks of analysis, and we really had a need to be able to respond faster,” Bennett reveals. “Cardinal Health had previously been very reactive in our approach to decision making and things were happening to us that we couldn’t see,” he explains. “And so, our relationship started out of a genuine need of our customers to be able to plan their organisational work, their surgeries, their procedures without the threat of more disruption.”
That need for speed became transformational…
Read the full interview here!
- AI in Supply Chain
- Together in Events