Cold Front Approaching: China gets serious about pharma temperature control

Standards lead to big data

One of the tangential benefits to participation in either a GDP or CEIV program, Lau pointed out, is the potential for companies to gather information for deeper, “big data” analysis of their operations. Whether it’s CEIV or GDP, it’s a start to create a formal language,” he said. “For now, it’s really a preliminary stage to really start getting the basics right. When there is more information available, in terms of how we’re tracking, maybe in the next few years’ time, then things will come together.”

Ten years ago, Lau recalled, when he used to work in sales at Cathay, “we didn’t have that many active companies asking a lot about temperature excursions, because [the data] was just not there. Now, we even have some pharmaceutical perishable shippers who do their own tracking to measure temperature excursions. So we know there is data that exists out there. So, with these technologies, they can enable us to do better analysis in terms of the potential gaps that we have along the chain.”

In the long term, Lau continued, “maybe in the next few years, we will be able to do more structural reviews… If we have the data available, which, in mainland China, is not too  difficult to get, then you will be able to see a better demand forecast for certain types of products. And then we could actually go back to the supply chain, and see how we planned the capacity and how we planned the relevant requirements in terms of the cool chain requirement that we want to go by.”

Zuellig’s Marshall agreed about the huge potential that certification programs can have on big-data analysis. “This is an area that we haven’t had the capability to analyze before, but it certainly fits in with the new approach of risk-based management, so we identify where the gaps are [and] reduce the risks for the entire process,” he said. “I think one of the numbers we were talking about was that we lose somewhere between 20 and 30 percent of our temperature-controlled shipments because of temperature excursions. There’s huge potential for applying a risk-based approach to how we reduce that, because it’s not just the cost of lost product, it’s also patients that are impacted by not being able to have medicine administered.”