top of page

Selection of a Cold Chain Monitoring Solution Series #4: The Unique Way We Structure Our Network

Updated: Aug 9, 2021


Anttail's Network Infrastructure

Mark Roemer:

We have a rather unique way that we have structured our network. If you want to details about seamless cold chain monitoring, we do have a nice white paper about this on our website. So please go there and download it. (go to bottom of page) If you look at the drawing on the left and on the left side of the drawing, you see a production plant or a GMP facility as it's called in a pharmaceutical industry where products are made and our ideal scenario is that as soon as something is boxed in the factory you add the sensor to it. This is because the sensor will stay with that box during the entire supply chain and the people who unpack the box either in the hospital or in a pharmacy where hundreds of packages are received can see the whole history of what happened to that box. And not just the last truck that came in from a wholesaler in a specific country, because that type of history is going to be insufficient. People really just want two things, they want assurance that what they receive is the original product and complete temperature shipment history.

So they don't receive counterfeit product they want confirmation that the quality of the product is still the same as it was when it left the factory. This is truly one of the most important things I think that people will want to know from a monitoring solution. We offer counterfeit visibility should the box be opened.

You can see the supply chain here, it's another graphical display. You have multiple cycles in the middle and currently, it's like every time you have one of the cycles they use the single-use logger, or they use maybe an online, logger to monitor that, that piece of the supply chain, but this multiple cycle thing that can happen 3, 4, 5 times.

You can have all this fragmented information from different systems from all kinds of suppliers. So what we want to do is that box that you see coming out of that factory on the left, the first box, you want to put the sensor in there and the same sensor is going to be in there during all of those multiple cycles. When it comes out of those multiple cycles it's going to be unpacked. So then you don't need all this data consolidation in the middle to be able to know what has actually happened to the box, it makes that whole process a lot simpler. And the other thing we can do and that's on the right side, which is also, let's say a rather new concept.

It's what we call a T.O.S. or T.O.R. that's an acronym people use time out of storage or time out of refrigeration. People (product) have a budget, then the budget is how much time can this product can be in refrigeration or out of storage before it cannot be delivered further down the line to the next transfer points.

We can provide information to manage the budget. So if in steps one and two. People use less of the budget than they're allotted so that the allotted ones are on the top 1, 2, 3, 4, you see them on the right side and you see in the middle what we actually measured. And then you see in step three, normally this shipment would be disqualified and destroyed or shredded because it went over the time out of storage that was budgeted for this step, but since we had budget left in steps one and two, this product can still proceed down the line because it's not over the total budget yet. This saves pharmaceutical companies money because you don't destroy products that are still good to use. I hope I make some sense.

7 views0 comments

Comments


bottom of page