MSD’s Pharmaceutical Cold Chain Goes Digital
By Allison Fowler
Every dose matters for pharmaceutical cold chains. For over 130 years, MSD has been inventing for life, bringing forward medicines and vaccines for many of the world’s most challenging diseases. The company is at the forefront of research to prevent and treat diseases that threaten people and animals – including cancer, infectious diseases, such as HIV and Ebola, and emerging animal diseases.
MSD needed real-time visibility and prescriptive solutions for cold chain management, so they partnered with TransVoyant to activate a digital plant-to-patient control tower as a mission-critical part of their digital supply chain journey. MSD’s goal was to achieve transparent movement of products to all regions of the globe, ensuring high quality and reliable supply for customers and patients.
Figure 1: MSD’s pharmaceutical cold chain implemented digital real-time monitoring to avoid millions of dollars in product discards due to temperature excursions.
Cold Chain Challenges
- Temperature controlled systems that required monitoring and robust business processes to maintain product integrity and avoid potential product discards
- In-transit disruptions created product receipt delays with partners and customers
- Performance across the transportation network was highly variable resulting in increased costs for increased service levels
- Disparate ecosystem of partners, systems, and data made it difficult to trace performance, diagnose root causes, and optimize for future performance
- Track and trace, serialization, and product integrity required fusing order, shipment, customer and product handling unit data with new requirements
“We’ve avoided discards of over three million vaccine doses through visibility, insights, and actions taken on our international shipments”
– David Komjati, MSD Director of CoE Transportation and Distribution
Cold Chain Key Results
- Ability to share ETA updates (both event-driven and procedure-driven) via email links and standard reports
- IoT device-agnostic live temperature monitoring, excursion validation, and automated product stability reports
- Automated exceptions based on product stability data, real-time location, time out of temperature range, and time remaining to delivery
“TransVoyant is a key partner for us to drive data integration, return shipment visibility, lane risk assessment, and predictive analysis,” says Frederic Brut, Head of Supply Chain EEMEA & APAC, MSD. “It’s a really great application and service for us to track our products through.”
The TransVoyant platform uses APIs to capture the required supply chain data streams from ERP systems, trading partner clouds, IoT devices, external global events, and more. The data is fused in a modern data lake to provide a flexible, secure, and auditable data structure. This auditable “single source of truth” for cold chain operations supports a variety of analytics, insights, and dashboard reports that provide actionable intelligence to regional operations, quality teams, global supply chain, and more.
Allison Fowler is TransVoyant’s Chief Product Officer.
TO LEARN MORE ABOUT COLD CHAIN DIGITAL MANAGEMENT, DOWNLOAD OUR SPECIAL REPORT, THREE TRENDS IN COLD CHAIN TECHNOLOGIES
Know what you don’t know.
© 2024 TransVoyant, Inc. All rights reserved.