By Karen E. Thuermer, AJOT “I could fill a whole day with problems we have daily,” commented Arnesse Morris, logistics manager of Quintiles Transnational, a pharmaceutical services company in Atlanta during a Georgia Logistics Summit in May. “We never plan our day. We just walk in see what sort of mess we’re going to have today.” His problem, like many healthcare and pharmaceutical concerns, is the fact Quintiles is dealing with an ultra sensitive perishable with a very limited shelf life. The product must be shipped by air cargo, but many of the carriers that handle such perishables—like FedEx and UPS—work off set delivery times. “Because we are moving biological samples from needle to arm, we basically have 48 hours to get that sample tested otherwise it is no good,” Morris explains. “If that happens, we have to redraw the patient, and there’s only so many times a person can be a pin cushion.” Worse, if redrawing samples results in a patient no longer desiring to take part in the testing, that translates to lost data and longer lead times for pharmaceutical companies to get certain drugs to market. “Using the typical metric of a 10:30 AM drop off does not work for us,” Morris says. “When a shipment comes into Quintiles, we expect it by 6:30 AM. Operational and executive input is a must.” Particularly critical is having transparency between the courier and the business. “There must be a level of buy in and ownership from both parties,” Morris emphasizes. To solve the problem, Morris went to FedEx to convince them to offer his company 24 hour service to a gateway in Mexico through which FedEx did not operate. He then approached Expeditors International and told them to cooperate with FedEx for their end of Quintiles’s business. “It was in that type of operation and dealing that I got something done,” Morris recalls. “It’s that type of optimal use of resources that you have to seek out in this market to get benefits.” That’s because, he explains, in life sciences there are gaps in service where couriers may not be able to provide every detail needed. “However, there may be another level of provider, small or large, who can come in and fill that gap and get your package from A to Z with all the bells and whistles,” he says. Morris points out, collaborative partnerships have to be more than just working together. “You have to constantly challenge them,” he says. Shipping biological materials, in this market particularly, is very difficult because of the critical need for temperature controls and their delivery time schedules. Then there’s the added fact they are a highly regulated product facing increasing security issues. “Not many carriers want to deal with biological products in their aircraft or coming through Customs,” he says. Genentech Concerns Genentech, which merged with the Swiss pharmaceutical conglomerate Hoffmann-La Roche in 2009, operates a distribution center in Louisville, Kentucky. The site handles come of Genentech’s best known products: Tamiflu and Pegasys. “It’s Genentech’s first location outside of California,” says Jeffrey Uligian, site head at the Kentucky DC. “We call it ‘from Bay to the Bluegrass.’” Uligian explains Genentech chose to locate in Louisville largely because of its supply chain needs. In Louisville, this basically means being located on the doorstep of UPS and a central market with access to millions of consumers. UPS operates its largest air cargo hub, dubbed Worldport, in Louisville. “Our shipments involve small, yet valuable shipments, and they are time and temperature sensitive,” he says. While the company once used a third party logistics operator (3PL) in Baltimore to handle its shipments, an incident whereby a pallet fell from a rack breaking vials of product, made the company realize how quickly such an incident could put the company in jeopardy if a particular product was in short supply. Consequently, the company prefers that on no else touch the product in a warehousing setting