Adviser to Chief Operating Officer — Healthcare Cold Chain

The mandate

The standing operational question is whether the current cold chain can withstand biologics growth and increasingly narrow stability windows without relying on heroic exception handling. Service metrics obscure excursion investigation, hand-off ambiguity and lane-level fragility.

Two days monthly include a lane-risk session and Quality Committee attendance, with one simulated disruption review each quarter. A serious excursion trend requires acknowledgement within twenty-four hours and advice within three working days.

The term lasts nine months through the monsoon and winter validation cycles. Renewal for up to three months rests with the COO and quality chair; the adviser has no line authority, batch-release role, executive responsibility or supplier-approval power.

Other commitments are capped at three. Assignments with a competing distributor, principal manufacturer, logistics provider, packaging vendor or monitoring supplier must be disclosed and may bar access to commercial material.

Why the board wants this voice

Quality owns compliance, logistics owns service and commercial teams own principals, but lane resilience crosses all three. The committee lacks an operator who has managed temperature-critical healthcare at network scale. It wants challenge grounded in actual failure recovery.

What you will own

• Test lane risk using product stability, hand-offs, dwell points, ambient exposure and recovery options.
• Challenge excursion metrics that close investigations without addressing systemic causes.
• Press leaders to define decision rights when service urgency conflicts with quality release.
• Shape supplier-accountability principles for packaging, monitoring, transport and storage.
• Examine whether contingency stock and alternate lanes match clinical criticality.
• Guide quarterly scenario reviews covering hub loss, device failure and prolonged heat events.
• Advise the committee on evidence required to approve higher-risk biologic lanes.

Candidate qualifications

• 22–28 years in pharmaceutical, biologics or healthcare supply-chain leadership.
• Direct accountability for GDP-aligned cold-chain operations across multiple Indian regions.
• Experience investigating excursions and changing network design from root-cause evidence.
• Knowledge of qualification, stability, packaging, monitoring and chain-of-custody controls.
• Committee-level communication across quality, commercial and logistics leaders.
• Independence from carriers and technology suppliers under evaluation.

Non-negotiables

• Two Delhi NCR days monthly through both seasonal validation cycles.
• Twenty-four-hour acknowledgement of a documented serious excursion pattern.
• Disclosure of manufacturer, distributor, carrier and monitoring-vendor interests.
• No operational release, vendor approval or product-disposition authority.

1. 49 words maximum. Which cold-chain failure did you help correct, and what lane or packaging change prevented recurrence?
2. 49 words maximum. What healthcare, carrier, packaging or monitoring relationships should be disclosed to this committee?
3. 49 words maximum. Can you protect two monthly days across monsoon and winter validation, including quarterly simulations?