On 12 February 2025, Sigma Healthcare Limited completed its acquisition of CW Group Holdings — the parent of Chemist Warehouse, Amcal, and Discount Drug Stores — by way of scheme of arrangement. New Sigma shares commenced trading on a normal-settlement basis the following day. The combined entity, when its first integrated full-year results dropped four months later, reported statutory revenue of $6.0 billion, up 82.2% year-on-year, and announced that across fourteen distribution centres in Australia it had distributed more than 532 million units over the twelve months, maintaining Delivery in Full at 99.6% and Despatch on Time at 99.5% — while absorbing a 29% volume increase, largely from the commencement of the Chemist Warehouse PBS supply contract.
Read those numbers a second time. They describe what is, by most defensible measures, the largest pharmaceutical distribution network in Australia, and one of the most operationally complex single-domain logistics machines on the continent.
The press coverage of the merger has focused on the obvious questions: PBS pricing dynamics, franchisee economics, the competitive position relative to Sigma's old wholesale customers (some of whom are now competitors of its largest customer), and the regulatory journey to ACCC approval. Those are real questions and other people will write about them well.
This post is about a different question. The question every multi-DC operator finds themselves looking at, somewhere around month 15 of a major integration:
Have we ever actually built the field-operations visibility layer for this network — or are we still running on whichever pre-merger tools each side brought to the table?
What the post-merger machine looks like in numbers
The shape of the Sigma + Chemist Warehouse network at FY25 close, as disclosed in the FY25 annual report:
- ~900 Australian franchise stores across three brands (Chemist Warehouse, Amcal, Discount Drug Stores).
- 80+ international stores across four countries.
- ~3,000 wholesale pharmacy customers continuing to be served as the back-of-house wholesale business.
- 14 distribution centres across Australia, with 260,500 sqm of aggregate capacity.
- 532 million units distributed in the year.
- Delivery in Full: 99.6%. Despatch on Time: 99.5%.
- Per-unit cost to serve: down 11% year-on-year, on the back of the volume absorption.
And then, since FY25 year-end, the rationalisation:
- South Guildford DC (Western Australia): closing. Volumes absorb into Canning Vale.
- Port Adelaide DC (South Australia): closing. Volumes absorb into Pooraka.
- Preston VIC ePharmacy DC: closing in September 2025. Online sales fold into the store network.
- Full network consolidation: by late 2026.
The thing to notice is the cadence. February 2025 close. June 2025 first integrated results. September 2025 first DC closure. Late 2026 full consolidation. The merger is moving fast, by post-merger-integration standards. That fastness is the operational story, and it's the context in which the field-ops visibility question gets answered, or doesn't.
The visibility geometry of a 14-DC network
Pre-merger, Sigma operated eight Australian DCs. Chemist Warehouse had its own logistics operation supporting its retail and ePharmacy businesses, with the actual fulfilment for its retail PBS supply having transitioned to Sigma on 1 July 2024 — eight months before the merger implementation, under the new wholesale supply contract that was, in effect, the operational rehearsal for the integrated business.
That means by February 2025 — the merger implementation date — the wholesale supply flow was already integrated. What was not integrated, at that point, was the rest:
- Distribution centre operations management (warehouse management systems, picking workflows, inventory).
- Outbound transport (third-party logistics relationships, contractor fleets, owned fleet).
- Field force coordination (sales, merchandising, store-support visits).
- ePharmacy fulfilment (which the FY25 announcement says is now consolidating into the broader network).
- Cross-DC visibility for the management cohort (the dashboard or system of record an Operations Director uses to see what's happening across the network right now).
That last one is the field-ops layer this post is about.
Where the field-ops question lives
The standard mental model of a distribution network is: DCs are nodes; trucks are edges; the visibility you need is the node state. Most warehouse management systems (WMS) are very good at the node state. SAP Extended Warehouse Management, Manhattan Active WM, Blue Yonder — these systems will tell you, in real time, what's on which rack, what's been picked, what's in dispatch, what's on the dock.
What they will not natively tell you is what's happening on the edges — in the trucks moving between DCs, in the third-party logistics flows out to the 900 franchise stores and the 3,000 wholesale customers, in the contractor field visits to those stores for merchandising and compliance, in the cross-DC reallocation runs that happen when a stockout in one site is plugged from inventory at another.
The edges are where Chain of Responsibility (CoR) liability lives — every truck on every public road, the operator is consigning is in CoR scope, and the consignor (in this case, the network operator) carries director-level liability for fatigue management and load compliance, as covered in our prior post.
The edges are also where the operational reality of the post-merger network actually plays out. A 99.6% Delivery-in-Full is a beautiful number, but it's a node-state metric — it measures what arrived at the destination, not what happened to the truck and driver on the way. Post-merger Operations Directors looking at the 14-DC network are increasingly asking the sharper version of the question: what does our edge visibility look like, and is it built around the network we have now, or around the network either of us had pre-merger?
What changes at month 15 of an integration
Most post-merger integrations follow a recognisable rhythm. Months 1–6 are the don't break it phase: keep the old systems running on both sides, route exceptions to the integration program, deliver the headline synergies that the deal model promised. Months 6–12 are the consolidate the obvious phase: pick the winning ERP, the winning WMS, the winning HR system; retire the loser; announce the savings.
Months 12–18 are the now what phase. The obvious consolidation has happened. The headline savings have landed. What's left is the longer tail of decisions about systems that weren't in either of the original "obvious" categories, and that's where the field-ops question lands. Because field-ops visibility — driver dashboards, journey management, contractor field workflows, in-transit incident handling — is rarely the most important system either side brought to the table. It's the third-most-important on the operations side, after WMS and TMS.
But the merged network is different in shape from either of the pre-merger networks. A 14-DC operation with 900 franchise stores and 3,000 wholesale customers and an ongoing rationalisation program (with three DCs scheduled to close in the next 18 months, and volume reallocations across all 14) is a network where:
- Inter-DC transfer trucks are running on routes that didn't exist 18 months ago.
- Drivers are working rosters that span DC pairs they may never have worked between.
- Franchise-store field visits are being routed by a sales/merchandising organisation that's still figuring out which side of the merger owns the relationship.
- Contractors and third-party providers are negotiating new contracts that don't always inherit the old monitoring tooling.
That's the point at which the operations leadership stops asking did we keep the old tool or pick a new one? and starts asking do we have a single view of what's happening on our edges? Because the answer, almost always, is no — we have the old views of the old networks, plus a manual layer of email-and-spreadsheet stitching, and the manual layer is fraying.
The post-merger field-ops question is rarely "which tool did we keep?" It's "do we have a single view of what's happening on the edges of the network we actually have now?"
What "the edges" actually contain
Let's get concrete. A driver leaves Sigma's Canning Vale DC in Perth at 04:30 on a Tuesday with a load destined for a Chemist Warehouse store in Kalgoorlie — a ~600 km drive that, with a fatigue break, sits inside a single legal driving day under HVNL. Between Canning Vale and Kalgoorlie, the driver:
- Passes through three CoR-monitored rest stops.
- Hits two known-difficult mobile reception dead zones (one east of Merredin, one around Coolgardie).
- Has scheduled check-ins at the 2-hour, 4-hour, and arrival marks.
- Carries a payload that includes PBS-listed medications with cold-chain requirements (though the temperature monitoring is on the trailer itself, not on the driver's device).
- Arrives at a store that has its own delivery acceptance protocol — signed off by the pharmacist on duty, recorded against the consignment number.
That single journey is in CoR scope. It is also in WHS scope (the driver is a remote/isolated worker for several segments of the route, depending on time of day and reception status). It is in commercial scope (the store is a franchisee with its own service-level commitments). It is in regulatory scope (the medications carry their own monitoring requirements). And it sits inside an integration program that, in the broader 14-DC view, is one of thousands of journeys happening in any given week.
The question isn't can we see that the truck arrived? The Sigma WMS will tell you that. The question is can we see, for that journey, what the driver experienced, what was logged, what was missed, what was escalated, and what an audit of the journey would look like 18 months later?
That's the field-ops visibility layer. It sits on top of WMS and TMS rather than replacing them. It's not the most important system in a post-merger integration, and it's frequently the one that gets deferred. But it's the system that produces the audit trail — and in a network that big, the audit trail is the bet that the next regulatory or insurance question gets answered cleanly.
Why now is the window
The reason this gets written now, rather than at the original merger announcement in December 2023 or the implementation date in February 2025, is that month 15 is the typical decision point. The WMS consolidation is happening or has happened. The TMS choice has been made. The DC closures are announced. The field-ops layer is either being designed into the new network (because someone made a deliberate call) or being inherited (because nobody did).
For the operations leadership at any large multi-DC operator going through an integration window — Sigma + CW is the legible example, but the same pattern applies to mid-cap mergers, to the post-acquisition phase of private-equity-backed roll-ups, to public-sector consolidations in health and emergency-services networks — month 15 is the moment to decide. Build the field-ops visibility layer now, while the network is being rebuilt around you, or accept that it will get bolted on later in a less-considered way.
The cost difference between designed and bolted-on is significant. The audit-trail quality difference is larger.
What we'd recommend looking at
For an Operations Director or Logistics GM reading this from inside any post-merger distribution network:
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Map the edges. Make a one-page diagram of every category of journey your network produces — inter-DC, DC-to-store, store-to-store, contractor field visits, third-party-logistics outbound. Estimate journeys per week per category. The categories with the most journeys are where the field-ops layer earns its budget.
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Run a one-week edge-visibility self-audit. For each category, ask: if a regulator or insurer asked us for a full journey timeline (driver, route, check-ins, escalations, dwell-time, fatigue compliance, incident outcomes) for any journey in this category last week, could we produce it inside 48 hours? The answer for at least one category will be no. That category is where the gap is.
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Talk to the field supervisors, not the dashboards. The most accurate picture of how your edge actually operates lives in the supervisors' heads and in the WhatsApp groups they're using to back-channel around the official systems. That picture is the spec for what the field-ops layer needs to replace.
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Decide before month 24. The further into the integration the decision gets pushed, the harder it is to design rather than bolt-on. The cleanest window is months 12–18. The next cleanest is months 18–24. After that, it's a retrofit project.
The merger numbers are public. The integration cadence is public. The decision is private, and it's being made — at Sigma + CW and at every other multi-DC operator in a similar position — right now.
Sources: Sigma Healthcare ASX announcements, 12 February 2025 (merger implementation) and 28 August 2025 (FY25 financial results). Sigma Healthcare FY25 Annual Report. Australian Financial Review company announcements, ASX:SIG. The TetraSense team. All figures cited are publicly disclosed; no confidential information has been used.
