How Pharmaceutical Companies Can Improve Efficiencies In Their Supply Chain Using Their Own Air Cargo Tracking Systems

The following details will help improve Supply Chain efficiency using these steps and how they can help using your own air cargo tracking system. 

Shipping via air delivery has always played a key role when transporting pharmaceutical products, most importantly, your temperature sensitive life saving medicines. 

In the past it has always been a challenge to track pharmaceutical shipments once these were airborne. Most critical were the pharmaceutical goods that were susceptible to the changing temperatures during the delivery process to the end customers.

However, recently, there have been many advances in the direction of air tracking systems that can be implemented and used by the actual pharma companies, instead of relying on the air freight system reports that may lack the real-time status and environmental conditions of your shipments.

A recent report from IATA (The International Air Transport Association) stated that air cargo represents almost $5.8 Trillion in products, which represents roughly 34% of the global freight volumes. The troubles with increasing jet fuel prices coupled with the US vs China trade war has not helped.

These types of challenges help persuade pharmaceutical companies to transform and incorporate their own tracking systems with the help of these other system profeesionals.

Just to add, most of the air cargo tracking systems still lack the information critical to the pharmaceutical needs, for example they wont alert when the important shipment is being processed through customs checks and being released without a manual process by a person actually entering this into the system. 

Here are some of the reasons and benefits when setting up and implementing your own pharma air cargo tracking system.

Instant access to the real time status of your products delivery from start to finish.

Transporting and tracking Pharma products has never been more important in today’s world. Using the Internet and the latest application technologies, these have become more easily implemented.

The following are examples of how some of these can be used to create more transparency and real time visibility of pharmaceutical products within the supply chain from start to finish.

Overall Visibility – Making timely decisions regarding your supply chain using real time visibility leads to optimizing the entire process of your pharma distribution. For example, enhanced product delivery tracking allows you to accurately predict how much to ship and to what location, without having to worry about overstocking. This will reduce waste and capital expenses and overstocking.

Reducing Spoilage – Using your own internal tracking system will also help reduce waste due to non-compliance of the FIFO standard and reduce product spoilage. Using your own system will also reduce wastage due to product expiring in your inventory.

Product Condition – Increasing your pharmaceutical product’s condition visibility through the entire shipment process will help to reduce damage by receiving real time alerts to breaks in both the supply chain and the cold chain if your products require a maintained temperature. 

For example, with the proper analysis and getting familiar with your shipping routes, you can track which particular route consistently has problems with your supply or cold chain. You can then better prepare your shipments in advance, or change these routes all together, saving time and possible product damage.

Supply and Demand – Increasing visibility allows you to streamline your pharmaceutical sales efficiency, now having the knowledge from this visibility in your supply chain to predict more accurately the volumes required from your warehouse to the end customers on each route. This helps reduce excess buffer stock needed and overall sales costs.

Managing in a Crisis – Enhanced supply chain visibility using your own systems will drastically help when it comes to sudden spikes in demand for pharma products, as an example during an epidemic such as COVID or other illnesses. Real time tracking and complete transparency regarding your product inventory will allow you to make proactive decisions about when and where to ship drugs where they are urgently needed without jeopardizing your other customers in the supply chain. 

This will enhance your ability to provide your end customers the products and services they need when a crisis hits. This will positively affect your company’s brand name, but also inject confidence within your customer base and help when it comes to competing directly with your competitors in the pharma market place. 

Summary and Conclusion

Even though you may be satisfied with the tracking systems that are already in place using your shipping distribution companies, the question is, do their systems have the transparency and visibility that you need to better manage your own distribution system when it comes to your specific pharmaceutical products? 

If you are not prepared for the unexpected and unpredictability that is and always will be common when it comes to the shipment of products, then you need to accept that you may be at risk for all the reasons outlined above. 

If accepting that fact, then it would be time to begin checking into implementing your own tracking supply chain system that includes real time visibility.