The requirements for cold supply chains, especially for Pharma and Biotech industry, are of the highest standards, in coherence with the relevance of the freight involved and the potential consequences in case of an issue. The conditions for the transportation of chemicals, vaccines (human or animal), blood plasma, tissues, clinical trials and similar items need to be guaranteed for the whole supply chain, especially referring to the temperature range.
Ranges of temperature may be very diverse depending of the product, but it is necessary that the process is stable, maintain the “cool chain”. Any deviation over or under of these limits may cause the degradation of the product. The key challenge that the cool chain industry faces is the loss incurred due to temperature excursions – typically estimated at over 20% of total revenue. Additionally, in pharma/biotech products these excursions could have a major impact (from inoperancy to toxicity), especially if they are not registered. In this scenario, the convenience of SmartCOOLBOX is presented, as a Logistic service for high-reliability temperature-controlled products, based on: - SmartCOOLBOX itself, an intelligent, connected, reusable and modular ISOTHERMAL CONTAINER… - … that is OFFERED AS A SERVICE, which simplifies the managing of the transport process
SmartCOOLBOX is an integrated combination of several innovations and technologies which feature:
- Use of light and degradable materials, offering longer life isothermal conditions range at the same time (warrantied for 7 days, following the defined storage and handling conditions)
- Modularity and adaptation to actual goods measures
- Smart sensors for tracking the conditions of the transport
- Smart alerts system to track, and prevent or detect incidents, enabling rescue actions
- Reusability of boxes and materials
- Communications based on GSM triangulation, Wi-FI or Narrowband networks (NB-IoT, Sigfox, Lora,..) in the near future, a low cost, low energy consumption solutions.
- Service covers the full supply chain, including reverse logistics
With SmartCOOLBOX, hospitals, labs and generic logistics operators may handle materials without relevant precautions, increasing safety while decreasing costs. Pharma and biotech industries will reduce losses due to temperature excursions and, in consequence, will open new markets such as difficult geographic areas, as well as disaster areas or in conflict regions. From environmental perspective, savings will come by modular reusable boxes and less wasted products.
At the current moment several opportunities and trends push for a solution like SmartCOOLBOX:
- “As is” current business way means a real and deep pain for pharma industry, both in economic, image and risks for patients’ health factors (e.g. 25% of vaccines reach their destination degraded)
- Trend to adopt circular economy model, due to reduction of costs and environmental impact
- Availability and affordability of sensors and IoT technologies, as well as data analytics and communications
This leads to an opportunity window not exploited yet and INPROUS is in the best position to take advantage of it.
INPROUS is formed by a team with extensive knowledge in pharma cool chain, when offered as a service, with experience in the creation and growth of new business. We have existing agreements with large pharma and biotech industries, having direct access to its logistics and quality departments, as well as experience on their logistics homologation processes. Finally, circular business model has been validated by INPROUS with conventional boxes.
