How to protect the pharma supply chain

Sophisticated supply chain monitoring advances are increasingly being deployed to ensure the protection of pharmaceutical payloads in transit. Remote and real time tracking technologies help track and trace high-value pharma shipments, delivering cold chain compliance.

These new advanced software systems and the integration of information technologies (IT) within the pharma supply chain are increasingly playing a vital part in protecting pharmaceutical shipments, helping to combat counterfeiting of drugs on route to their designated destinations.

Maintaining end-to-end pharma supply chain integrity is critical to mitigate risks within the pharma-logistics cold chain and better ensure the safe and secure transportation of health-giving and life-saving pharmaceutical products. Transparency of the status of the shipment is an increasing demand from the lane owners for pharmaceutical shipments.  Transparency of location, transparency of temperature history and transparency of circumstance of each access to the payload space are all of great interest.

The global life sciences industry faces several complex challenges, including protecting the integrity of their temperature-sensitive high-value payloads during transportation. This must be done while mitigating costs, managing and tracking the assets within a complex cold chain closed loop logistics system, meeting stringent global regulatory standards and navigating complicated global shipping lanes and unforeseen challenges.

With pharmaceutical companies developing ever more complex and temperature sensitive drugs, there’s growing demand to integrate IT solutions within the supply chain, balanced alongside the established requirements of providing improved packaging performance and efficiency within cold chain logistics. It’s vital to ensure there’s a secure, compliant cold chain from deployment of shipments from the packaging factory line, to the distribution centre and, finally, to last mile delivery.

Innovation, IT integration and new technologies to enhance supply chain monitoring and remote tracking are proving pivotal to support adherence to GDP (Good Distribution Practice) regulations within cold chain logistics. These technologies are crucial in addition to the continuous evolution of smart temperature controlled packaging protecting pharmaceutical payloads globally.

The industry is also seeing a growing trend to deploy reusable systems coupled with asset management SaaS (software as a service) and reaping the associated benefits. These systems can automatically collect and analyse data from company smart data logger outputs. These monitoring devices are increasingly being used in cold chain as they become more affordable and thus more accessible to pharmaceutical companies. These lane owners are excited about the prospect of offsetting the costs of these new technologies with savings, based on reduction of lost drug products and fine tuning distribution models based on efficiencies proven by data from the smart devices.

A key development includes real time monitoring of payloads, via smart loggers and devices which are interconnected to the Internet of Things (IoT), making it possible to access and assess the condition of the payload at anywhere across its journey. Being alerted about a temperature excursion within the shipped package before it reaches destination allows preventive or corrective supply chain actions earlier than would have otherwise been possible.

Real time monitoring devices can be helpful to get precise data on a payload, at its exact location, but they have downsides as well, such as size, cost and limited battery life due to their reliance on two way communication technology, essentially a mobile phone.

Another class of smart devices is also used to track location and temperature throughout the journey when exact location and condition is not needed.  These just in time (JIT) devices often use other methods of communication when passing through a physical IoT gate or providing a download of data via Bluetooth, QR code, bar code, USB connection or others. This information can be assessed at the end of a journey for logged temperature throughout the trip, as well as location, number of opens of the payload space and more.

Depending on the location, condition and temperature data needed by shipping lane or even individual shipment, real time or JIT devices can be an ideal fit when weighing urgency of data need versus cost and reduction in payload size to accommodate the device.

Data retrieved and shared can help the pharmaceutical manufacturers make more informed choices on the most appropriate packaging systems to deploy depending on specific shipping lanes and routes their payload needs to navigate.

Increasingly, both passive and active bulk systems are incorporating IoT devices to track the temperature, location and other data throughout the course of the trip.

Issues can arise for the temperature in the payload space, if the shipper is opened during a customs inspection or tampered with, the IoT device can track or warn when the shipper has been opened, for how long and if there is a risk to the payload’s temperature requirements. 

Alternatively, IoT device devices can be attached to a specialised container to ship a pallet of products providing an isolated monitoring option to pick up data, which can be saved to the Cloud via Bluetooth or Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID). 

If payloads are intercepted, lost or get delayed en-route, the pharmaceutical company can take steps to intervene and recharge or replace coolants, so the package or the bulk system gets delivered before expected temperature duration is exhausted. This presents a strong case for using IoT devices and their supporting software and technology to mitigate a temperature excursion caused by a delay.

Any deviations in temperature, beyond the range specific pharmaceutical products are required to be stored and shipped at, could have a devastating effect on the payload, damaging the container’s contents and impacting the efficacy of the products being transported for use by patients.

Therefore, temperature monitoring is becoming more commonplace, due to the cost of IoT devices and the capture of the data becoming both affordable and accessible.

Packaging companies are frequently utilising advanced asset management software systems, which are in place specifically to ensure drug products are shipped to the right place, at the right time and, critically, arrive in the right condition.

The use of and sharing of that data between packaging providers, logistics providers and pharma companies themselves is an area of increasing interest enabling the development of better, more effective solutions to meet the challenges that are now better understood through that data.