Delivering Pharma’s Mega Projects in a Resource-Constrained World

Rising capital investment in pharmaceutical manufacturing is pushing projects to unprecedented scale, but execution strategies haven’t fully kept pace. As companies commit billions to new facilities they’re encountering a new set of challenges around planning, coordination, and risk management. What worked for smaller, site-based upgrades is insufficient for multibillion-dollar builds involving thousands of stakeholders, constrained resources, and increasingly complex regional dynamics.

In the latest two-part series of Off Script, we spoke with Pathfinder President Steve Cabano and Mark Christopher, vice president and head of the company's pharmaceutical division, about what it takes to successfully deliver mega-scale capital projects in today’s environment. Pathfinder is a project management consulting firm.

The first part of the conversation explores how the industry’s shift toward large-scale North American manufacturing is exposing gaps in project controls, contracting strategies, and organizational readiness. They discuss the growing importance of early-stage planning, clearer decision ownership, and construction-driven execution models, as well as how labor competition, permitting hurdles, utility constraints, and global procurement risks are reshaping timelines and cost structures.

In the second part of the interview, the discussion explored how post-pandemic supply chain instability and tariff uncertainty are impacting procurement strategies, scheduling assumptions, and project economics, with lead times for critical equipment stretching far beyond historical norms. It also examines the growing importance of portfolio-level governance as companies attempt to manage dozens of overlapping billion-dollar initiatives while maintaining existing operations, avoiding internal resource conflicts, and preparing for a future shaped by modularization, robotics, and AI-enabled project delivery.