00:57

Moderator: Today we want to talk about supply chain orchestration, a theme closely connected to others we hear all the time in supply chain management. Some of you may have been at [unclear] earlier this year, where the main topics were AI and resilience. Both came up in today's presentations, and orchestration is closely related to them. To be resilient in your supply chain, you have to respond to events as they happen. That's where orchestration comes in.

01:30

Moderator: I don't know the official definition, but I would define supply chain orchestration as the coordination of decisions and actions to make sure the shipment arrives on time and without incidents, particularly when something doesn't go according to plan. That's when this coordination becomes most critical, and I think it will be one of the main topics for the evolution of pharmaceutical logistics in the coming years. That's why I'm excited to discuss it with our three panelists. I'll invite them one by one to give a short introduction. Stephanie, we're starting with you, as head of pharma at Delta.

02:21

Stephanie Sosa, Delta Cargo: Thank you. My name is Stephanie Sosa, and I lead pharmaceutical products for Delta Cargo. The focus of my role is to develop new solutions for pharmaceutical shipments with Delta. I have over 15 years in the supply chain industry, I'm very passionate about what we do in pharmaceutical business, and I'm very happy to be here.

02:48

Moderator: Great to have you here. Next we'll move on to Martin at DP World.

02:58

Martin, DP World: Martin is my name. If I include my traineeship, I have about 30 years in the supply chain industry, half of it in pharmaceutical logistics. I'm currently in charge of GDP compliance in Europe for DP World. Before that, I was global quality manager for healthcare at Schenker, and before that I worked for DHL in the same area.

03:20

Moderator: Thank you, Martin. And finally, someone who I think also joined the first Digital Cold Chain Forum back in 2018. We've known each other for more than eight years. Please introduce yourself.

03:39

Ruben, independent consultant: My name is Ruben. I'm an independent consultant, mainly working in QA and supply chain, and today I'll share my experience from the multiple pharmaceutical companies I've worked for. So I will tackle the pharma side in this panel.

03:59

Moderator: Thank you very much, Ruben. I think the composition of this panel illustrates very well what we envision for Validaide: a community for collaboration between all the different stakeholders in pharmaceutical logistics, with the airline, forwarding, and manufacturing sides represented here. Before we dive into the discussion about orchestration, we have two questions for you. Please grab your phone. We also asked this question at our event two years ago. It isn't based on facts, only on your feeling, as people actively working in pharmaceutical logistics. What percentage of all shipments, particularly in air and ocean, have some kind of incident? There's no right or wrong answer.

05:16

Moderator: [Audience poll results shown on screen.] Very interesting distribution. There's a big group in the 0 to 2% range, as there was two years ago. But the biggest group chose the highest option we provided, more than 8%, and there's also a big group at 5 to 8%. Around 30 people indicate that more than 5% of all shipments still face some kind of incident. It's by no means scientific research, but I think it shows that we've come a long way in pharmaceutical logistics, and that it's still inherently complex and things still go wrong. That makes orchestration, responding to incidents and coordinating actions, very critical.

06:25

Moderator: Next question, on coordination and taking decisions to follow up on these incidents. Where do you see the most coordination gaps, particularly between companies? We have a lot of different options, which I hope are more readable on your phone and on the screen.

07:27

Moderator: [Audience voting continues. The vote comes down to a close race between two options.]

08:23

Moderator: Okay, we're going to stop now, because we have a winner. Thank you very much for voting. The answers are quite spread. Data sharing came in third, which is maybe not surprising, but two answers clearly stood out. One is handover points between supply chain partners, the winner. That's quite generic, but when you have multiple parties, handover points are always a risk. The other is cargo handling at airports and terminals. That's a well-known topic. Particularly in airfreight, it's assumed that many excursions happen on the tarmac or with the ground handling agent.

09:25

Moderator: Thank you for voting. That was a good start, setting the scene. We're pressed for time, and with these experts we could talk about supply chain orchestration for hours, so we need to speed up. I'd like a quick answer from each of you following up on the last question. Do these answers confirm your own experience? Where do you see the biggest coordination gap? Maybe I'll start with Stephanie.

10:09

Stephanie Sosa, Delta Cargo: Of course, on panels like this we see this kind of response, because audiences have an impression of ocean carriers and airline operators. From our reality, when we look at our data to find root causes and where our failures are, a lot of the time we find that the problems are in the planning phase. Planning showed up here with maybe two votes. We're very transparent about the way we do things. We make our information public, and everyone has good visibility of the tarmac and how we handle misconnections or cancellations.

11:18

Stephanie Sosa, Delta Cargo: A lot of the time, when we analyze data from tracking devices, we find we operated within our SOPs and standard procedures, but the planning, the packaging, even the routes were not used properly. It's sometimes difficult to have a conversation about how we address our failures, because there is very little room for improvement on our side. Planning is often the best place to address them, because once a shipment is in our possession, in the middle of the transportation cycle, and it moves as planned under our standard procedures, there is very little we can do to save it. So how you plan and prepare your shipment matters. Sometimes people don't do the risk assessments they should. The two areas that were voted most, the handover between partners and the tarmac, don't show as many issues for us as people assume.

12:37

Moderator: Your answer makes me think of what Marek said earlier today about flagging high-risk shipments. There's a heat wave in Europe right now, for example, which could add risk. So in the planning phase there may be room to do more. Let's park that one. Martin, what's your view on these answers?

13:01

Martin, DP World: To be honest, they surprised me a little, but maybe I understood the question differently. You asked about coordination gaps, and maybe the audience understood it as where deviations most often appear. From a coordination point of view, I would rank exception and disruption management, and data sharing, much higher. It's always a combination of topics at the end of the day. So I'm a little surprised, but it may be a different understanding of the question, which is fair enough.

13:57

Ruben: From a shipper's perspective, I understand the answers. If you look at your circle of influence, the further away it gets from you, the more gaps appear. It's hard to keep control over shipments once they pass to a 3PL, then a 4PL, and all the other partners in the supply chain. I also agree with Martin that if you look at where coordination is failing, it's more exception management and issue management, because sometimes it's simply difficult to identify the right stakeholders and decision makers.

14:34

Moderator: Interesting. That leads directly to the next question. From a manufacturing or shipper's perspective, where do you see the main challenges in supply chain orchestration?

14:48

Ruben: I think it's mainly that you depend on your 3PLs. There are not many pharma companies that can do the whole shipment organization themselves, so whether your supply chain is successful depends on your collaboration with the 3PL. Some pharma companies see it as outsourcing. They throw the problem over the fence and expect the 3PL to handle everything correctly and to their expectations. I think that's too simple. You need to build a long-term collaboration with your 3PL players, so that they do it the way you want and also invest in you as a customer, and you're not there for three years and then move on to the next cheapest provider. That isn't a good way of working. Going from outsourcing to real collaboration matters, and this morning's presentation on co-creation is a good example. We should do that more often.

16:07

Moderator: A quick follow-up. We also hear more often about alert fatigue. You don't want to be overloaded with alerts. I assume you expect your forwarder or LSP to take on the burden of managing incidents and exceptions. Is that fair?

16:34

Ruben: Yes, you can put that on the 3PL. They have the best visibility of what's going on. But up front you need to give clear guidance on when something counts as a deviation. Everything else the 3PL can handle, and there needs to be a trigger so they inform you. It can be a pre-alarm, which is also fine. It depends on the product and on the risk of the lane, but you have to be clear up front about what you expect from them. A recent example was a truck shipment in Europe. At around 4:30 p.m. we got an email saying there was an ongoing temperature excursion, which had already been going on for five hours. At the very end of the day, you get the question of whether you can still deliver to the customer, and then you work overtime to find the stability data and give an answer. It's already been ongoing for five hours, so you're at least 4.5 hours too late. Those are the things to focus on: give them clear instructions on when to inform you, and how.

18:06

Moderator: So defining clear responsibilities and processes is one of the preconditions for successful orchestration. Okay. Martin, we move to you as the forwarder, the other side. What makes orchestration difficult for you when you have to align all these different parties, especially in situations like a deviation?

18:24

Martin, DP World: In general, it's our job to coordinate the shipment. That's our main turf. Pharma is different because of the sensitivity of the cargo. The main challenge, from my point of view, is the data that's available. We've talked about silos several times today and about breaking them down. But instead of only breaking down silos between different parties, you also have to break down the silos within your own organization, because sometimes you don't get the information you want.

19:01

Martin, DP World: It's nice if I know, for example, that at an airport the cargo was not on the flight. That's fine, but then I also need to know where the cargo is at that moment. Is it still on the tarmac? Is it back in the warehouse? We don't have that information. Sebastian said earlier that they're still working with Excel sheets, and the level of the carriers is a different one. It's not only the carriers, it's also the freight forwarders, everybody involved. You can't point a finger at one party. It's a general approach in the industry. The technology is there. We need to make use of it, invest in it, and have the openness to collaborate and share information.

19:55

Martin, DP World: That's still a big issue, because some companies don't want to share when there's a deviation, to protect themselves, or so nobody finds out. I think that's the wrong approach. At the end of the supply chain there is a patient. If I take a pill, I want to be sure it's valid, that it works for me, and that it's not hurting me.

20:21

Moderator: Let me interpret your answer a little. Based on my experience, airlines are very good at providing flight status updates, but orchestration also needs shipment status updates: the exact location and status of an individual shipment. Is that correct?

20:38

Martin, DP World: That's correct, and it applies not only to airlines but also to ocean. It also applies when we use a third-party cross-dock facility. You need the milestones connected with temperature. That's where the entire industry still needs to evolve, because it's partly missing. It's quite frustrating. Twenty years ago we were talking about blockchain for all that information, and here we are today still discussing the same topics. What's really needed is an independent forum where you can share the data, so that nobody owns the data but it's shared. I think that would be the best solution at the end of the day.

21:30

Moderator: Makes sense. Now the airline side, where you also have a critical role. It's challenging, because you're in the middle between your customers and also depend on ground handling agents in your network. I'm sure you do your own handling at Delta's main hubs, but in the outer network you depend on external ground handling agents. What information or capabilities would help you fulfill your responsibilities better?

22:01

Stephanie Sosa, Delta Cargo: Because we're in the middle, we have very limited access to data. All we can act on is based on our own scanning points. From airport to airport we have countless scanning points. You would be impressed by how many. We know exactly where your shipment is, when the airplane landed, when the crew left with vehicles to go to the tarmac and recover the shipment, when they made it back, when they broke it down, and when they put it in the cooler. We have full visibility of all these points, and our recovery actions are based on the information we have access to.

22:46

Stephanie Sosa, Delta Cargo: What we don't know, and I think it will never be shared with us proactively, is the contingency when we fail. For how long can that package resist, and what is the tolerance of the drug inside? That level of information would help us take actions appropriate to the condition. Here is an example. Not long ago we had a flight diverted because of safety concerns at the arrival airport. When it landed, the station manager called me and said, this flight was diverted to my station and I see seven air waybills with pharma. That station was not a certified pharma station for Delta. The station manager didn't have coolers or plugs to charge the containers, and his staff was not trained, so no one knew what to do.

23:50

Stephanie Sosa, Delta Cargo: So we made it happen. We had two temperature-controlled trucks assigned within two hours to move the shipments to the correct airport, a transit time of five hours. Nothing crazy, but the arrival time was also tight, because the station needed to close. We moved everything as planned and protected the shipments at all times. Three customers were impacted. Two of them didn't even notice the shipments were 12 hours delayed, and they were very pleased that we protected them. But one customer's product was not very sensitive, so he didn't pack for a deviation. The planning was for a two-day transit, and that was already too late for the gel packs and for the shipment to be preconditioned and continue the journey.

24:53

Stephanie Sosa, Delta Cargo: We made the best decisions we could. But there is a specific packaging and a specific drug where that customer would have preferred that we keep the shipment at the diversion airport, because he had a station there that could repack it and continue the journey, and he would even have preferred to continue the journey himself. These are situations where we don't have full visibility of what the shipment can sustain.

25:24

Moderator: Thank you for sharing that. It's a very concrete example of the realities of airfreight logistics.

25:33

Martin, DP World: You're right that information exchange isn't one way. We need it in both directions, especially for passive shipments, which are sometimes packed a day before and then run out of lifecycle, because the time counts from when the shipment was packed. You still think you're in good order, but you've already lost a day just because you didn't have the information. It would be good for the industry to make that information a requirement on the air waybill, so that you work with real data.

26:14

Moderator: I appreciate your example. I want to move on to a final question from my side, and then we'll open it up to the audience. It's the move from reactive to proactive, which comes up a lot in our discussions. Instead of responding to an incident that has already happened, what can we do to prevent it in the first place? What is required in the industry to make that transition? Who wants to start?

27:01

Ruben: I think it all comes back to the data fragmentation we're always talking about. As a pharma shipper, most of the time you don't have full visibility of your shipments. You hand it over, and sometimes the proof of delivery is the moment you know everything went well. For us it's sometimes a black box. Having a platform you can log into, with automated alarms, is already a big win. Then you can take the next step, for example pre-alarms: something is about to go out of spec, so let's look into it. But you can have real-time visibility, and if you don't have a 3PL or 4PL that can do something about it, it doesn't make sense. So we also need processes in place to act on what we see.

28:13

Moderator: Excellent answer. Thank you. Stephanie, I know you want to add something.

28:18

Stephanie Sosa, Delta Cargo: I have a slightly different opinion. I'm a big supporter of risk assessments and of how you prepare and risk-assess the route. What's missing is that, when you do it correctly using real data, for example data from your past 100 shipments on a lane with a provider, you can be proactive and mitigate the risk. But then there's how you share that data with your providers. Most of the time I'm not even considered for a route anymore, because of something we didn't do well or have to do differently, and that feedback sometimes never reaches us. So for me it's how you plan and how you share the result of your planning.

29:14

Moderator: So that needs to drive change, sharing information across the ecosystem with all the stakeholders. Thank you. Martin, do you want to add to that?

29:24

Martin, DP World: I agree. We saw today how CSL orchestrates its risk assessment and involves the other parties, and that's definitely the right approach. We still receive quality agreements with unrealistic requirements, for example for calibrating an ocean freight container. I can hardly see an ocean freight container calibrated to a standard norm. They do the pre-trip inspection, and the reality proves that this works. But some people still think you just have to calibrate it or temperature map it. The same goes when you break down the supply chain and present it as one step, then another step. If you load an airplane compartment, the ambient air is going around it. It's not like a fridge where you open the door, put in the product, and close it. It takes time until you can recool the compartment, and the warehouse isn't there. So we need a more collaborative approach: listen to the experts on logistics, but also to the manufacturers, who are the experts in their products and know the stability data and the packaging they used.

30:47

Moderator: Let me wrap that up in my head. First, there are still steps to take in connecting the data. Second, share that data among the stakeholders. Third, define responsibilities and processes based on that information. And fourth, base all of it on sharing the expertise of the different stakeholders in a collaborative way.

31:09

Martin, DP World: Definitely.

31:10

Moderator: Okay. That's at least a summary for myself. We have time for questions from the audience. If you have a question for one of the three panelists, please raise your hand.

31:36

Audience member: Very interesting discussion over the last few minutes. It seems you all know the problem, and it's been there for many years. Martin, you mentioned that data seems to be one of the themes. What is stopping pharma manufacturers from getting real-time visibility?

32:01

Martin, DP World: From my perspective, it's not the manufacturers or the freight forwarders or the carriers. It's the collaboration at the end of the day. Everybody wants it, but it seems that no one is taking the first step. You may have a milestone showing where the shipment is, and if you're lucky you have the temperature at that moment, but the two aren't connected because they're in different systems. That's why you first need to break down the silos in your own area, and then you can share connected data. How you do it is a good question, because it's always related to investment, and there's a price tag. Compliance is not cheap.

32:56

Stephanie Sosa, Delta Cargo: I think there are very few opportunities to get all the players together for a constructive conversation, because it gets very difficult when something goes wrong and we have to find who's responsible. This is my second Digital Cold Chain Forum, and I think the environment here is right. We collaborate, share experiences, and do it in a healthy, friendly way. We don't see that day to day, so we're lacking opportunities to have open-minded conversations in a way that lets us really collaborate.

33:36

Ruben: I want to add to that. I think long-term relationships are very important, as I said about your 3PL, because otherwise they won't make that investment. For all the shippers in the audience, building long-term relationships is a good goal. Then you can take the next step and have the 3PL make that investment. In the end it's all about money. That's what makes the world go round. That's the honest truth, and you also need to take that step as a shipper.

34:16

Moderator: I can comment from my perspective, because it's a very valid point and I recognize it. But in the last two years I've seen a shift in the industry. In the end, the push needs to come from the pharmaceutical manufacturers. They will drive this change. In the last few years we've seen different expectations and different plans from pharma manufacturers, including investments in these kinds of solutions. CSL is one example we saw earlier today, but we see it with our other customers too. They're moving along a maturity curve. They started by moving risk assessments from Excel to a digital platform, and now they're taking the next steps. So I'm positive about the next few years. Maybe in two years, at the next forum, we'll see more examples of that.

35:15

Audience member: On certification of processes at airports, airlines, and ground and cargo handlers, could I get your take on GDP or CEIV, and what matters to the shipper? It seems like very few have CEIV and a lot have GDP. Is it worth it?

35:47

Stephanie Sosa: Are you a shipper? Who are you?

35:52

Audience member: I'm [unclear].

35:55

Stephanie Sosa, Delta Cargo: Okay, let me rethink my answer then. As an airline partner, I would highly recommend that you go down that path, because it's not an easy process. I don't know what level of certification you're looking at. The way we did it, we decided to certify at our headquarters level, which means every place where we handle pharma is included in the audit. We also decided to certify in our largest hubs, Atlanta and JFK, mainly because of the volumes we handle there. What the standards require of us is a quality management system that works and that you can back with evidence.

36:44

Stephanie Sosa, Delta Cargo: That's why we prefer to have it at a local level, because then you have local quality management systems with responsible people who manage the local exceptions. The checklist and the whole process are endless, but it's worth it. Every two or three years an auditor you never know comes knocking at your door and reviews all this evidence, to make sure that on a day-to-day basis you do what you're supposed to do. It isn't me telling your customer that I'm doing these things. Someone else comes in. They don't tell you what's on the checklist, and they look at what they believe are your weak points. That tells people you're doing your work. And from that moment, believe it or not, things get easier, because you have processes, ownership, and structure, and everything you need to perform the job.

37:55

Audience member: I'd like to hear from Ruben and Martin. I'm not sure it's given the same value by shippers as by an airline. We also see CEIV. We know the process, but I'm not sure it's a deciding factor for many shippers.

38:13

Ruben, independent consultant: It can be. If you're shipping to a certain country and you can choose between two airports, one with a three-hour truck ride from the destination, it can be a decisive factor. In the end you want to protect your product as much as possible. For some products it's worth paying a premium for a dedicated pharma service at an airline. With a lot of new technologies, products can be very sensitive temperature-wise, so it can be a decisive factor.

39:01

Martin, DP World: When I'm asked for my honest opinion: when CEIV was introduced, the statement was, forget about GDP, you only need CEIV. I said no, not really, because CEIV is only an option to meet GDP requirements. In the end you more or less need both, or one is the same as the other. But it doesn't mean you just check the boxes. You need to do it right the first time. I recently audited a company in Ireland that even held a wholesaler license, and I had to give them major deviations for the document management system: wrong numbering, wrong effective dates, all that. I was thinking, what is going on here? You have a wholesaler license, and I'm coming from a forwarder to audit you as a subcontractor and identify all this.

40:06

Martin, DP World: So it always comes down to the auditor and the auditor's knowledge. You can have a perfect auditor in the industry who knows everything about GMP, but if that person audits a freight forwarder or an airline, they may completely fail because they don't know the rules and the circumstances around it. You always need to send the right person. That gives you much more than checking boxes with a perfect checklist when you don't understand what's behind it.

40:40

Stephanie Sosa, Delta Cargo: As a recommendation, from my perspective: every time we implement a new flight or look at a new airport or location, I usually come on board to assess what that airport can offer, who the players are, and who we select to do our handling. I usually don't even look at handlers that are not either GDP or CEIV certified, because the conversations and the implementation of the location would be way more difficult. You'd need to teach them the standards. Put yourself in the customer's position and ask who you want to hire to handle your flight. That can probably help you answer this. For us, implementation gets much easier when we have a provider that complies with those standards.