Are you experiencing the following 10 problems with your current logistics courier?
1: Temperature excursions due to poor response times by your courier.
2: Shipments stuck in customs due to incorrect paperwork.
3: Missed pick up times.
4: Incorrect booking dates.
5: Deliveries to wrong locations.
6: Failures due to not picking up the shippers on time.
7: Lack of tracking information that is reliable or timely.
8: Shipments being misrouted or routed inefficiently.
9: Poor communication with your courier.
10: Not achieving key shipment milestones as originally planned.
Among the many challenges COVID-19 has brought to light in all walks of life; formidable challenges abound with shipping critical, high value, temperature sensitive materials. And as expected, some logistic couriers are flourishing while others are floundering. The impact on key stakeholders, especially within cell and gene therapy, has been profound. The loss of critical and often irreplaceable material can be devastating; clinical programs can fail and worse yet, the outcome for immunocompromised patients can be lethal.
Shortly after COVID-19 began, numerous people have reached out to me lamenting how their critical and often irreplaceable materials have been rendered useless due to courier related issues. Moreover, several conversations have ensued with sponsors in the midst of clinical trials. And while the idea of switching couriers in the middle of a clinical trial is highly disruptive, often sponsors have had no choice but to make a change.
Cryoport Systems has grown leaps and bounds during the pandemic due to our ability to mitigate risk. One of the fundamental ways we accomplish this is by being courier agnostic. In short, we are not tied to any courier. Rather, we partner with over 30 different couriers. Furthermore, having made over 425,000 shipments to date managed within our proprietary cloud-based Cryoportal® Logistics Management Platform; Cryoport maintains a record of every single shipment we've ever made with every single courier we've utilized. We have the ability to mine or ‘drill-down’ within our Cryoportal® and measure specific courier performance within specific lanes. The result? Data driven decisions that allow our clients to proactively mitigate risk.
Furthering our ability to mitigate risk is Cryoport’s Smartpak II® Condition Monitoring System providing visibility to internal and external temperature, orientation, shock, humidity, light, pressure as well as physical location. This technology accommodates each shipper while communicating directly with our cloud-based Cryoportal® Logistics Management Platform.
Let’s contrast our Smartpak II® with the industry standard data logger. Data loggers record events throughout a shipments journey. Once the shipment has completed, the user will upload the logger into their computer and get a readout as to what transpired throughout the journey. While this information is critical , it is relayed onto the user after the shipment has finished. In contrast, Cryoport’s Smartpak II® provides near real-time information, giving our clients and us a birds-eye view to any potential risks to the shipment. This can be described as intelligent, proactive information that is actionable. If there's a risk to a shipment, such as the shipper laying on its side losing holding time as a result; we see this early and take appropriate steps to intervene before potentially resulting in a catastrophic failure. Simply put, game-changing technology that’s turning the industry on its head.
Finally, we have a global 24-hour, seven day a week customer service team monitoring and managing each shipment. Our team is accessible by phone and email 24 hours a day. This offers our clients tremendous peace of mind knowing that our team is monitoring their shipment, and should they have any question(s) our team is always accessible. You honestly cannot put a price on outstanding service. In wrapping up, by being Courier Agnostic, leveraging absolute best-in-class technology to monitor shipments in real-time and having a 24/7 logistics team providing support allows for a highly customer centric experience that uniquely mitigates risk. A patient’s life is at stake, trust Cryoport!
If you or your team are experiencing these all-too-common courier related challenges and would like to learn more how Cryoport navigates these obstacles with our technology and systems; my colleagues and I would welcome a conversation.