Case Study: Cardinal Health achieves $3M+ annual warehouse savings with AnyLogic Simulation Software

Modeling Operations at Pharmaceutical Distribution Warehouses

Cardinal Health, a pharmaceutical distribution and logistics company, needed to improve day-to-day warehouse performance under high variability and strict pharma constraints. Traditional trial-and-error methods and standard models couldn’t adequately capture congestion, worker variability, and emergent warehouse dynamics, so Cardinal Health turned to AnyLogic simulation software to safely test layouts, picking, and staffing strategies.

Using AnyLogic, Cardinal Health built an agent-based simulation that modeled employees as individual agents and imported operational data such as picking times and performance standards. The solution helped compare layouts and staffing scenarios, reduce congestion, and balance workloads; as a result, average shift length dropped from 10.5 hours to 7.25 hours, generating more than $3 million in annual savings and increasing employee capacity.

Cardinal Health

Brian Heath

Director of Advanced Analytics