Odi's Journey of Running Covid Supply Chain to Owning a 3PL 📦

Welcome to The Operating Chief, where we go behind the scenes with the operators, logistics leads, and fulfillment architects who keep supply chains moving every single day.

In this edition, we have Odi Ikpe, Managing Director at Elite Prep Center. Odi spent nearly two decades working across pharmaceutical and vaccine supply chains before moving into 3PL and e-commerce fulfillment.

In this conversation, Odi shares what years in pharma taught him about running operations, managing risk, maintaining quality, and building fulfillment systems that can scale.

You spent much of your career managing pharmaceutical and vaccine supply chains before moving much closer to day-to-day warehouse execution at Elite Prep Center. What surprised you most about the difference between the two environments?

During my nearly two decades supporting vaccine supply chains, I was hesitant to leave pharma because I wasn’t sure I would find the same sense of mission elsewhere. What surprised me most was how quickly that was replaced by an obsession with customer outcomes.

The difference is that the feedback loop in a 3PL is much more immediate. In pharma, you are often one part of an enormous global system serving patients at scale. In warehouse operations, you can see the direct consequence of a decision that same day.

What operating principles from pharma have transferred almost unchanged into running a 3PL?

“Quality First, Quality Always” is a principle from pharma that transferred into running a 3PL. At a 3PL, quality shows up in inventory accuracy, correct labeling, lot and expiration-date control, packaging, and getting the right product to the right destination on time. A small execution error can create all sorts of non-value-added work and wasted time: rework, chargebacks, stranded inventory, or the dreaded lost client trust. The cost of poor quality is very real.

I carried over building the process to ensure the right outcomes happen consistently throughout rather than hoping someone catches a mistake at the very end.

What have you had to unlearn? What worked at Merck or Pfizer but became too slow, expensive, or complicated in a smaller operation?

One thing I had to unlearn was the instinct to solve every problem with more resources. At Merck and Pfizer, there was far greater access to capital with specialized expertise and enterprise systems.

At Elite Prep Center, I find myself saying “not now” much more often than I would like. Every improvement competes directly for limited capital and my attention, so I have had to become much more disciplined about sequencing investments and distinguishing what is necessary today from what can wait. 

The important part is not allowing “not now” to become “never.” We track improvement ideas, prioritize them, and execute them as the economics and operational needs justify it. That also matters culturally because the team needs to see that their ideas actually turn into improvements over time.

Vaccine supply chains have unusually high consequences for shortages, quality failures, and traceability gaps. How did that shape the way you learned to think about operational risk?

Whatever can go wrong will likely happen. Vaccine supply chains taught me to assume that operational failures are possible and to understand the consequences before they occur. I spend a lot of time thinking through our failure modes: where can the process break, how would we know quickly, and what controls or contingencies should already be in place?

In pharma, you learn that risk cannot simply be documented; it has to be actively managed. Issues become much harder and more expensive to address once they have already happened. That mindset has stayed with me. I would rather spend time identifying vulnerabilities upfront than spend considerably more time recovering from an avoidable failure.

At Merck, you planned supply for GARDASIL during a period when demand was growing faster than manufacturing capacity could respond. What did that experience teach you about managing scarcity when producing more is not an immediate option?

This was a unique market condition. Scarcity challenged us to explore every opportunity to increase output using the assets and capacity we already had.

One of the biggest lessons for me was the cost of customization. Every unique configuration, special requirement, or additional changeover consumes some amount of scarce capacity. When demand significantly exceeds supply, complexity that might normally seem manageable suddenly matters a great deal.

It taught me that managing scarcity is not only about allocating limited supply. It is also about simplifying where possible, protecting bottlenecks, and making very deliberate decisions about what the network spends its capacity doing.

You later worked on COVID-19 vaccine supply at Pfizer, where the challenge eventually shifted from extraordinary demand toward normalization. What did managing both scarcity and changing demand teach you about planning for uncertainty?

Managing Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine supply often felt like building the plane while flying it. Uncertainty was the only constant. I learned not to build a plan around one expected outcome, but to prepare for multiple scenarios driven by decisions and variables outside our control. The key was understanding what we could control, preserving flexibility, and being ready to adjust quickly as conditions changed.

You mentioned traceability, inventory accuracy, quality systems, and exception management as disciplines e-commerce operations can borrow from pharma. Which has had the greatest practical value at Elite Prep Center?

Traceability has probably had the greatest practical value. We deliberately leveraged our pharma background to build capability around lot tracking, expiration-date management, and compliance. That created a natural fit with categories such as supplements, cosmetics, and packaged foods, where those controls are commercially important, not just operationally nice to have.

A 3PL cannot investigate every warehouse exception like a pharmaceutical deviation. How do you decide what deserves formal root-cause analysis and what is simply operational noise?

I look at severity and recurrence. An exception deserves formal root-cause analysis if it signals a process or system failure, creates meaningful customer impact, or keeps happening. A one-off minor delay may be operational noise; shipping the wrong item, losing traceability, or seeing the same error repeatedly is not.

If you were designing a minimum viable quality system for a growing 3PL, what controls would you consider non-negotiable?

I would say the must-haves are traceability, inventory accuracy, documented work instructions, and exception management. For products like supplements or packaged food, lot and expiration-date control would be non-negotiable. You do not need a pharma-sized quality system, but you do need enough control to know what you received, where it is, what happened to it, and how you respond when something goes wrong.

Where is the line between useful operational discipline and overengineering a warehouse?

The line is whether the discipline creates measurable value. Every control or investment should improve customer outcomes, reduce risk, or eliminate waste. If it adds complexity without doing one of those things, you are probably overengineering the operation.

Elite Prep Center fulfills FBA, DTC, wholesale, and other marketplace workflows. From the warehouse floor, what actually changes as you move between those channels?

The biggest differences are order profile, labeling, packing, and outbound flow. FBA and marketplace prep often require channel-specific labels, carton rules, and compliance steps, while DTC is typically individual-order pick/pack and parcel shipping. Wholesale shifts more toward case or pallet quantities. Our WMS, Hopstack, has helped standardize the underlying workflow across those channels.

Which is operationally harder to run well: a large predictable FBA or wholesale movement, or hundreds of smaller DTC orders? What makes one type of volume more difficult than another?

Hundreds of smaller DTC orders are harder to run well. The challenge is not just volume, but variability: more order combinations, more SKUs, different packaging requirements, and individual shipping labels. DTC also runs against tighter carrier cutoffs, so the operation has less room for delay than a large, predictable FBA or wholesale movement.

When the same customer sells through several channels, where does complexity start multiplying rather than simply adding?

Complexity starts multiplying when the same inventory has to support different channel requirements at the same time. One SKU may need different labels, packaging, service levels, and outbound workflows depending on whether it is going to Amazon, Walmart, wholesale, or DTC. At that point, you are not just adding channels; you are multiplying the number of decisions the operation has to make correctly.

Moving into a 3PL meant becoming much closer to the economics of each warehouse activity. What did you initially underestimate about the cost of fulfillment?

I knew labor was a major fulfillment cost, but I underestimated how quickly every additional touch compounds it. Receiving, counting, labeling, picking, packing, and especially rework all consume labor. I’ve come to learn that small process inefficiencies show up very quickly in the P&L. 

Different customers can generate radically different operational complexity even at similar volumes. How do you recognize and price that complexity before it becomes unprofitable?

There are a few fulfillment models that I have found challenging to execute efficiently. I now refer those clients to 3PLs better positioned to handle that work. For the opportunities we do pursue, we use time studies and simulations to understand the labor and complexity involved before pricing the work. Volume alone does not tell you whether an account will be profitable. 

What is something brands commonly believe about fulfillment that looks reasonable from an executive dashboard but becomes obviously wrong once you are responsible for getting the orders out every day?

Brands often think fulfillment performance starts when the order drops. It actually starts much earlier with inventory accuracy, clean SKU setup, packaging requirements, and order data. By the time an order reaches the warehouse, many of the conditions for success or failure have already been created. A late or incorrect shipment can look like a warehouse execution issue on a dashboard, when the root cause may have started upstream.

Is there an operational signal you now pay attention to that rarely appears in a standard KPI dashboard, but tells you early that an account or operation is about to run into trouble?

I pay close attention when the team is continually asking for clarification to execute routine work. That can signal we no longer have a clear standard or that the operation has drifted outside established processes. That is often an early warning that process control is weakening.

You entered the 3PL business after spending years inside much larger supply-chain organizations. Looking back, which parts of that experience gave you a genuine advantage, and which capabilities did you still have to learn from scratch? For someone entering the 3PL business today, what would you want them to understand before taking on their first customer?

My pharma experience gave me a strong problem-solving toolkit and experience managing complex, billion-dollar supply chains across 100+ markets. That prepared me well to manage a wide range of client needs and operational challenges. What I had to learn from scratch were the mechanics of programs like Amazon FBA and Walmart Fulfillment Services.

For someone entering the 3PL business today, I would tell them to know their numbers before taking on their first customer. Understand your labor, operating costs, and pricing well enough to know exactly what it will take for the account to be profitable.

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