In the first weeks of March 2020, the global pharmaceutical freight network unravelled faster than most logistics professionals had thought possible. Passenger aircraft, which had carried the bulk of time-sensitive medical cargo as belly freight for decades, were grounded across Europe, North America, and Asia. Port closures and border disinfection protocols added days to transit times. Spot airfreight rates in certain lanes increased by several hundred percent.
According to Merck KGaA’s own published account of the period, the company faced severe transportation shortages and limited air freight capacity while simultaneously experiencing a surge in demand for COVID-19-related raw materials from pharmaceutical manufacturers and vaccine developers worldwide.
For companies supplying those materials, the question was no longer how to optimize logistics. It was whether supply chains could function at all. As Chris Ross, then Head of Life Science Integrated Supply Chain Operations at Merck, stated in a 2020 interview with European Pharmaceutical Manufacturer, the pandemic created disruptions across every dimension of the company’s logistics operations simultaneously, with no historical precedent and no existing playbook.
Rajashiva Ramalingam, then serving as the SAP Transportation Management lead on a critical Merck KGaA engagement through Cognizant Technology Solutions, was among a small number of enterprise logistics specialists with both the technical access and the systems expertise to respond at the infrastructure level. Over the weeks that followed, he led a comprehensive reconfiguration of Merck’s SAP TM environment, restructuring the transportation planning logic that governed how the company’s Life Science division, operating as MilliporeSigma in the United States, moved raw materials, filtration systems, and cell culture media to pharmaceutical manufacturers and COVID-19 vaccine developers worldwide.
Rajashiva Ramalingam, at the time working through Cognizant Technology Solutions as an SAP Transportation Management specialist, was part of a small group of enterprise logistics engineers who had direct access to the systems governing global freight flows. His role placed him not in a planning office observing disruption, but inside the configuration layer of the systems that had to respond to it in real time.
His path to that point had been shaped by nearly two decades in enterprise systems and logistics technology across organisations including Microsoft, Apple, A.P. Moller - Maersk, and others. That experience had progressively narrowed from general SAP development into specialised work in transportation management architecture—particularly SAP Transportation Management (SAP TM) and SAP Event Management—where the focus is less on individual transactions and more on how entire freight networks behave under constraint.
At the core of that expertise was a grounding in enterprise engineering that began with a Computer Science Engineering degree completed in 2008 at Dhanalakshmi College of Engineering. His early roles, including SAP technical consulting work at Levergent Technologies and a contract engagement with Bharat Heavy Electricals Limited (BHEL), were deeply technical in nature, centered on ABAP development and underlying SAP database structures. That foundation in system-level design would later define his approach to large-scale logistics problems: treating transportation networks not as static processes but as dynamic systems governed by interdependent rules.
By the time he joined Cognizant and later Novigo, his career had shifted fully into transportation and warehouse management systems. This trajectory continued again at Cognizant and ITC Infotech, where he progressed into a functional lead role in SAP TM, working on global enterprise logistics systems at scale. It was in this capacity that he became involved in the Merck KGaA engagement that would later be tested by the COVID-19 disruption.
“Every assumption the system had been built on was being invalidated simultaneously, across every lane, in every region,” Ramalingam told this publication. “It was not a single disruption you could route around. The entire model needed to change, and it needed to change while shipments were already in transit.”
Rebuilding the Network Under Crisis Conditions
It was a big exposure for Merck during the pandemic. Merck KGaA had its own COVID-19 communications, and during the pandemic, it was active in 66 countries around the world with a system of crisis management and was determined to keep supplies flowing in its network, even if the borders were closed, freight was disrupted and trucks had to be reloaded or disinfected after crossing regional borders.
A case study by a third-party logistics company highlighted the effects of grounded flights and closed primary freight lanes and the necessity of new trade routes to be found and activated during a crisis, and the 24-hour tracking of cargo and a daily crisis meeting setup were in place to deal with the rapidly shifting environment.
Ramalingam’s response to this environment was systematic. He was the key player in the reconfiguration of carrier hierarchies within the Merck SAP TM environment that had lost its functionality due to the withdrawal/curtailment of primary freight partners. Secondary logistics options required to be boosted, verified for compliance and put into live planning logic. Freight tendering parameters were rewritten to incorporate spot market parameters that hadn't been seen in the system's history. Real-time freight visibility frameworks did away with milestone-based tracking, instead providing continuous monitoring of shipments and automatic notifications of exceptions, which gave logistics teams the chance to get in front of potential supply chain issues.
These decisions needed to be made with a deep understanding of SAP TM configuration and a business sense of which parts of the current architecture could be changed safely while it was running and which changes would create new risks. The incremental reconfiguration approach lowered the chance of adding new failure modes to a crisis-stressed system.
Merck KGaA's Life Science division ensured the continuity of its supply chain in the manufacturing and distribution processes during the pandemic. MilliporeSigma was already supporting over 50 companies of COVID-19 vaccine candidates in a December 2020 press release from Merck and also ramped up manufacturing investments to $47 million as demand surged to unprecedented levels. The seamless and continuous operations that made this possible merely demonstrated the technology systems infrastructure that Ramalingam had stabilised and reconfigured during crisis time.
The Crisis in Global Context
The logistics challenges Merck faced were part of a broader collapse of global freight infrastructure. A McKinsey & Company analysis of supply chain executives across industries found that 93 percent planned major changes to make their supply chains more flexible and resilient as a direct result of pandemic disruptions.
The World Economic Forum documented record freight rates, choked ports, out-of-place shipping containers, and the widespread failure of just-in-time supply chain models that had been optimised for stability rather than resilience. For pharmaceutical supply chains specifically, the consequences of these failures were not measured in commercial terms alone. Materials delayed in transit meant vaccine production timelines extended. Filtration components grounded at border crossings meant manufacturing lines waited.
Keeping a pharmaceutical logistics system operational during a period when the underlying freight infrastructure had largely failed was not a routine technical challenge. It required expertise, judgement, and composure under conditions that had no precedent in modern logistics history.
A Philosophy Confirmed by the Crisis
For Ramalingam, the pandemic validated a conviction he had been developing throughout a seventeen-year career spanning multiple countries and organisations, including Microsoft, Apple, and Maersk, before Merck. His central argument, articulated consistently with colleagues across the SAP supply chain community, is that the industry’s treatment of resilience and efficiency as competing values is a design error with measurable real-world consequences.
“A supply chain that cannot absorb disruption is not actually efficient,” he says. “It performs well under the conditions it was designed for. But the moment those conditions change, the efficiency disappears entirely, and you are left with a system that is expensive to operate and incapable of performing its core function. The pandemic demonstrated that at a scale that was impossible to dismiss.”
The design approach he advocates embeds resilience into system architecture from the start: carrier diversification built into planning logic so that fallback lanes exist before a crisis arrives; adaptive routing that reconfigures in response to real-time network conditions; and digital twin modelling that allows organisations to simulate and evaluate disruption responses prospectively. At ACCO Brands, where he now serves as Manager of SAP Transportation Management and Warehouse Applications, these principles define the strategic programmes he leads across transportation optimisation, logistics automation, and integrated supply chain transformation.
What His Record Means for the Field
The supply chain disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic prompted a fundamental rethinking of how enterprise logistics systems should be designed. Ramalingam’s work during the crisis positioned him not as a reactive responder to an emergency but as a practitioner who had been building toward the right answer before the question was visible to most of the industry.
His focus now includes artificial intelligence and predictive analytics applied to transportation management, digital twin modelling for prospective disruption simulation, and the connection between intelligent freight optimisation and sustainability outcomes. He argues that the same optimisation logic that reduces transportation costs simultaneously reduces emissions, and resilient, intelligent supply chain design and environmental responsibility reinforce rather than conflict with each other.
His record across seventeen years, validated under the most consequential supply chain stress test in a generation, establishes him as a practitioner whose contributions to enterprise logistics technology extend well beyond any single engagement. The pandemic made that clear. The field is still catching up to the implications.
