Tive Helps Optimize Courier Deliver OTIF Pharma Products by Eliminating Temperature Excursions
Without real-time visibility into your pharma shipment’s location and temperature, you are risking costly failures in your supply chain.
The Challenge
A new pharmaceutical client approached Optimize Courier, a leading logistics service provider, to devise a solution to address costly losses within their supply chain. The client lost $2.5 million of pharma the previous year when their product was shipped at the wrong temperature.
Pharma products ship at various ranges, including ambient (+15-25C), refrigerated (+2-8C) or frozen (-20C). The losses happened when temperature excursions occurred in only 1% of their orders. To complicate matters, cargo insurance policies do not cover temperature excursions.
The Solution
The temperature excursions were a result of unpredictable human errors, including improper preconditioning of packaging or mishandling of the pharma by the airline. The client was relying on traditional USB data loggers to record the temperature. Temperature excursions were only discovered after a shipment had been delivered. Conventional USB data loggers cannot identify when an unpredictable event, such as a temperature excursion, may occur.
Optimize partnered with Tive to launch the multi-sensor Solo 5G™ device with each shipment. Tive provides real-time visibility of the shipment’s temperature and sends active notifications to Optimize when a pharma shipment is at risk of incurring a temperature excursion.
The Tive tracker sends an alert to the Optimize operations team whenever a shipment is at risk of deviating from its required temperature range. Optimize uses that real-time notification to immediately investigate if the packaging was preconditioned improperly or if the airline loaded the shipment into the wrong cooler. This advanced notification allows Optimize to take proactive measures to prevent any temperature excursions.
In this case, a $500,000 shipment needed to stay within the ambient temperature range (+15-25C) that was shipping from Raleigh-Durham, NC to Memphis, TN. The planned routing used a passenger airline and their temperature-controlled service, connecting in Charlotte, NC.
When the shipment arrived at Charlotte, NC, Tive sent an alert notification to Optimize indicating that the temperature of the package had rapidly dropped down to +17C. Optimize contacted the airline and learned that the shipment was mistakenly put into a refrigerated cooler (+2-8C). The airline immediately removed the pharma shipment from the cooler and placed it into the proper ambient (+15-25C) conditions. Optimize arranged to recover the shipment in Charlotte, NC, with a temperature-controlled vehicle to safely drive the load the rest of the way to Memphis, TN.
This real-time notification prevented the company from losing $500,000 USD worth of goods and saved the shipment.
To learn more:
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