AstraZeneca's take on what really drives transformation
May 4
In a CSCO roundtable session at Gartner Symposium 2026, Arun Krishnan, CSCO at AstraZeneca, unpacked what it genuinely takes to transform a global supply chain and why the hardest part is rarely the technology.
Change is never just a technology project
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For AstraZeneca, change means moving four dimensions simultaneously: technology, process, people & skills, and data. All grounded in real business context. Progress on one dimension at the expense of the others doesn't transform anything. It just shifts the bottleneck.
That framing shapes everything else about how AstraZeneca approaches the journey, including what capabilities they invest in building, and how they think about the future.
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Three takeaways worth remembering
1. Build problem-finding, not just problem-solving
Most supply chain teams are well-trained to solve the problems they face. The harder and more valuable capability is knowing which problems to work on. Arun frames this as a critical organizational muscle: the ability to identify the right problems, challenge assumptions, and optimize for the enterprise rather than a single function. In complex, fast-moving supply chains, that distinction makes all the difference.
2. Think in three axes of time
One of the tensions every supply chain leader faces is the pull between today's performance and tomorrow's growth. Arun manages three time horizons: running the business today, co-innovating for near-term growth, and pushing the innovation curve for the future. Letting today's urgency crowd out the other two is how transformations stall. "Growth through innovation" is a company mandate at AstraZeneca.
3. Innovation has more levers than most teams use
Technology gets most of the attention, but Arun points to at least four complementary levers: process innovation, data innovation, technology innovation, and role innovation. Alongside those, the mindset shifts matter just as much; moving from rigid workflows to adaptive guardrails, from linear to assumption-based thinking, and from gut instinct to human judgment supported by better decision tools.
“The way to think about the change is always look at change end to end: technology, process, people and skills, data.” – Arun Krishnan, Chief Supply Chain Officer, AstraZeneca
A clear ambition that energizes teams and sustains momentum
AstraZeneca's transformation is anchored in a clear, ambitious mission: building the self-healing supply chain for the biopharma industry. The goal isn't just operational excellence inside one company, it's setting a new benchmark for the sector. That kind of mission-level framing gives people a reason to sustain the effort through the hard parts of change.
Transformation at this scale is, as Arun puts it, a team sport.
Want to explore more on AstraZeneca's transformation journey?