Cargo Chat: LOT Polish Airlines’ Kamil Rarak on the cool chain

In February, the Cool Chain Association (CCA) gained two new members in container specialist Tower Cold Chain and Warsaw-based combination carrier LOT Polish Airlines. The CCA is a nonprofit organization aimed at reducing product waste and improving the quality, efficiency and value of the temperature-controlled supply chain. [caption id="attachment_98880" align="alignright" width="350"] Kamil Rarak, Special Cargo Product Development and Training Manager, LOT Polish Airlines[/caption] Temperature-sensitive shipments have been in especially high demand due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Alongside the increase in demand, the shipments themselves are often for more specialized products requiring increasingly high transportation and monitoring standards. The complexity of cool-chain shipments is at the same time driving operators to improve standards, and last month led the CCA to launch a new Risk Management Committee. The committee will study and manage critical points in the cool chain, develop common standards and support projects in the field. Prior to joining the CCA, LOT Polish Airlines received the International Air Transport Association (IATA) Center of Excellence for Independent Validators in Pharmaceutical Logistics (CEIV Pharma) certification in 2020. With the airline now a part of the CCA, and Special Cargo Product Development and Training Manager Kamil Rarak joining the Risk Management Committee, Air Cargo World spoke with Rarak to learn more about LOT Polish Cargo’s pharmaceutical business and the goals for the CCA’s Risk Management Committee. Air Cargo World : You were closely involved with the CEIV Pharma certification process. What prompted the decision to pursue that certification and how did it change your pharma business? Kamil Rarak: I think that it was about shippers because they are responsible for choosing the airlines, not only for them but also for their quality management departments; the most important was steel. We are aiming to have a very serious business partner who has very clear and transparent rules and documents, instructions, procedures. We had to create plenty of internal procedures for each part of this cold and cool chain. We established over 30 procedures, SOPs, for dedicated parts of each process of handling and transporting these goods. We created PIL QMS, PIL [Pharmaceutical Products] Quality Management System, as well as we were able to show our business partners that we are a very serious player and we can provide them with the supreme level of quality of our services. CEIV Pharma is top of the top. It goes without saying that we can compare that with GDP – Good Distribution Practices – that have been implemented by a lot of airlines, yet they didn’t decide to implement CEIV Pharma certification. Why? Because it’s extremely hard to prepare a company for that. Not only did we have to change a lot of our internal processes but also our internal mindsets, which was the most problematic for us. Thanks to that, however, when the shippers and freight forwarders realized that they have a very serious business partner, they decided to send to us global RFQs, global RFPs, and year by year, we have been having increasingly more pharmaceutical shipments. Last year, the amount of transported pharmaceuticals was 200% larger than before COVID. ACW : And now that you have joined the Cool Chain Association and this new risk management committee, what are you hoping to achieve for the airline and also for the industry? KR: Our core goal involves creating common standards. We want to prepare a very transparent perspective for all participants of the cool chains, because they very often happen not to understand how they should treat particular particles of this responsibility, for example, if the shipper is responsible for something, the airline is responsible for something, but they don’t understand how it works. How it works while being the passive system solution. Because during the passive system solution, we can’t guarantee controlling temperature during the whole range of the cool chain, but we can protect the goods only in the warehouses at the port of origin and destination. During loading and unloading, transporting, during the flight, storing on the tarmac, we are not able to protect these goods because they must be prepared and packed in adherence to some rules. The risk management committee has been trying to prepare very transparent SOPs, information, as well as procedures, for all of these parts of the cool chain. Of course, it will be a huge challenge, because each party has their own vision, their own needs, in view of a lot of things: costs, quality, time of transfer, the way of packing, for example, using packages or using solution for that. But we can see that, we know that, and we hope that we will be able to deliver them some optimization, because we have no capacity to support everybody on the same level. But we can prepare some parameters or some rules that will show how they should prepare from their side to the next step of the cool chain. ACW : LOT Polish Airlines is the sixth airline to join the CCA. What are some of the advantages of pursuing common standards at this stage of the association? KR: I think the biggest advantage of this process is that CCA has not only airlines because, for example, IATA joined and collected in general freight forwarders and airlines. CCA is a little bit different because they want to collect all parties of this cool chain, and thanks to that, they are able to listen to everybody’s needs. From our perspective yes, we are the sixth airline, but the biggest global players are there too. So we talk to each other about very important and common — this is the most important — regulations. Because Central Eastern Europe is a huge source of producing plenty of pharmaceuticals and is a big gate between the Far East and India, both to Europe and from Europe. So, if we create common global standards, then not only we but also a lot of global companies will be able to use that. ACW : Is LOT Polish Airlines planning any investments or new products in pharma or healthcare operations? KR: We strongly believe in the pharma hybrid solution market because from our perspective, hybrid containers, I mean SkyCell or va-Q-tec, are very easy to use. They don’t need dry ice, nor do they need any electricity, so our ground handling agents, our shippers, our subcontractors, can use them very quickly. In Warsaw, one of these companies created a warehouse with hybrid containers. So, as far as we are concerned, we are ready just in time. If we need a container, we can book it just now and the next day it’s ready to go. Of course, we would like to invest in new technologies, new solutions, but the market is now full of these solutions that we are not able to give something completely different. So from our perspective, hybrid solution is greatly promoted because by using these containers, it is possible to transport them to Canada, the U.S., to India, to Incheon in Korea, to Narita. And I can see that it really works. We transport the active containers as well, but when we use the passive system solution, we are trying to explain to our customers and show them critical control points, to show them what risk could be found during the transport, what risk can be encountered, for example, at the final destination. How? We audit the airports, we audit our subcontractors, and of course, we are still trying to go far beyond this knowledge in our local European market, and we support also our colleagues from Budapest (BUD) when they started the process of CEIV Pharma certification, but they certified the whole airport.

Cargo Chat: LOT Polish Airlines’ Kamil Rarak on the cool chain

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