Air freight remains the predominant mode of transportation for moving life-saving pharmaceuticals around the globe, especially for the most valuable and sensitive therapies that require strict temperature control. For the foreseeable future, pharmaceutical companies will remain reliant on air freight for transportation of products that could succumb to temperature excursions.
Price pressures, alternatives to air freight and increasing automation are just a few of the forces that shaped the past decade for transporting pharmaceuticals. However, there are emerging trends that make 2020 unique.
To begin with, for the safety of the climate, air freight carriers — like their passenger transporting counterparts — will feel more pressure to seek alternative fuel sources and replace older planes with more fuel-efficient models.
Carriers and their logistics partners will also need to elevate their brand image by demonstrating they are adopting eco-friendly practices such as reusable or waste-stream friendly shipping containers made from recyclable materials. Especially for shipping pharmaceuticals, these shipping containers must still maintain strict temperature control to ensure valuable payloads arrive intact.
Pharmaceutical packaging manufacturers have broadened their product portfolios to enable the most efficient solutions to be selected, qualified and deployed on a lane-by-lane basis across truly global supply chains.
The good news is that cold chain consultants have the tools and resources to streamline this new approach. Packaging products have been engineered and tested to incorporate operational consistency and simplicity that might otherwise make it too complex to deploy. Networks and services have also been developed and deployed to enable efficient and reliable outsourcing of operations.
Source : Various Agencies