From RFP Chaos to Clarity: A Roadmap for Pharma's IoT Success

The pharmaceutical industry adopts IoT-enabled real-time visibility solutions for a reason: to reduce expensive product loss caused by temperature excursions. 

Over the past decade, with increased intensity in the last five years, large pharmaceutical companies have extensively tested and approved various tracking devices to drive supply chain resilience and flexibility. Some organizations rely on a single-source strategy; others opt for two or three device providers. And the temperature excursion rates have not improved -- in fact, they have gotten worse.

The IQVIA Institute for Human Data Science estimates that the biopharma industry loses approximately $35 billion annually due to failures in temperature-controlled logistics. 

• Statistics from the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Parenteral Drug Association (PDA) reveal that:

  • 25% of vaccines are shipped incorrectly and reach their destination damaged. 
  • 20% of temperature-sensitive products are damaged during shipment due to temperature excursions.

But what’s the point of IoT-enabled visibility if it doesn't reduce product loss and/or improve on-time, in-full (OTIF) delivery? 

The downstream impacts from temperature excursions are just as bad:

• Temperature excursions lead to increased costs due to the need for Root Cause Analysis (RCA) and Corrective Action (CAPA) reports
• The full disposition process for affected products incurs further expenses
• The need for replacement inventory negatively impacts inventory turns, cycle times, and buffer stock levels
• Time to market is also affected, leading to potential delays and lost or deferred revenue

There was once a dream that IoT will one day unlock the ability to: 

• make dynamic tradeoff decisions towards route selection and optimization
• better understand packaging performance and minimize over/under-packaging
• ensure carriers are adhering to validated/approved routes
• driving a way to minimize the monitoring costs 
• utilizing IoT data to eradicate temperature excursions and guarantee on-time delivery!

PAXAFE’s mission revolves around unlocking and realizing this vision.

And, thanks to the amazing progress in IoT, cellular networks, device designs, and lower component costs over the last 5 years, we can get the reliable, high-quality data we need – if we pick the right devices for the right routes and regions. 

The problem? Pharma’s device RFP process could use a major upgrade.

The PAXAFE Revelation

When PAXAFE was a younger company offering pharma-specific IoT devices in addition to its risk and decision support platform, we were eliminated from a particular IoT device RFP strictly for being a company younger than 5 years old. 

That’s it. 

Even though our platform checked all of the feature requirements. 

Ops teams loved our UX / UI.  

And our advanced risk & prediction capabilities were unmatched in the IoT market. 

We believe the device IoT RFP / selection process is broken. Large enterprises and procurement focus on things they rightly focused on ten years ago before having materially more substantive information available. 

And the results are clear.

PAXAFE’s platform ingests IoT device data directly from the tracker providers and indirectly from enterprise control towers. We see how and why devices perform by region, brand, and performance factors.

Without preprocessing the data or applying advanced techniques to bolster data granularity, roughly ~60% of shipments have the requisite data quality and consistency to operationalize action and enable workflow enhancements. 40% of shipments are rendered useless. Why? 

Pharmaceutical companies are not choosing the best device for each specific geographic location, resulting in less-than-ideal outcomes.

Without preprocessing the data or applying advanced techniques to bolster data granularity, roughly ~60% of shipments have the requisite data quality and consistency to operationalize action and enable workflow enhancements. 40% of shipments are rendered useless. Why? 

Pharmaceutical companies are not choosing the best device for each geographic location, resulting in less-than-ideal outcomes.

What Should Device Validation Look Like?

Rather than focusing primarily on a company’s revenue, how long it’s been around, how many people work at that company and how the market would ‘perceive’ a partnership, many more substantive factors can now be evaluated. 

First, ping rate consistency and performance should be at the heart of the evaluation process. IoT sensors will typically have two different rates of data collection: 

• Recording rate: collection of temperature, humidity and other sensor data that gets recorded but does not get sent to the cloud at the time of data collection
• Reporting rate: data connection is established, typically over cellular, then location (latitude, longitude), and all of the data collected at the Recording rate are transmitted

For Pharmaceuticals, standard communication protocols might include a 15-minute recording rate and a 60-minute reporting rate. Pharma companies sometimes have service level agreements (SLAs) with their device providers to ensure adequate reporting and recording communication frequency thresholds. 

Except for post-RFP, most Pharmaceutical companies don’t have an easy process for tracking device ping rates. They’re often surprised to learn that devices are underperforming their SLAs and promised ping rate frequencies.

PAXAFE Device Performance 

What’s most eye-opening about ping rate quality & consistency are the patterns we see at PAXAFE around the variability that device companies perform by: 

• Region 
• Mode of Transport (MoT)
• In-Transit versus Static (non-moving) Legs
• Types of packaging & payload positioning if in a payload)
• Types of packaging & pallet positioning in a truck (based on SOP)

Some providers are excellent in North America but terrible in Asia. Others are great in Europe but not so good in remote parts of Canada. 

Some are great in transit but flop out at customs. 

Some are great over the road but can’t reproduce the same consistency by train or can’t recapture a ping rate quickly enough once back on the ground after a flight.

Pharma companies must consider ping rate performance when setting up a new lane and conducting lane performance assessments and shipment route verification Standard Operating Procedures (SOP).

Another critical variable that Pharma must capture but struggles to do so is battery performance. Battery performance tells us several things about device deployment strategy. 

When Pharma takes a device company through the RFP phase, they don’t have any data on how batteries will perform 3 months, 6 months, 12 months and 24 months into their deployments. So, any up-front battery assessments are either: 

1. best guesses 
2. based on lab, controlled environment data, or 
3. based on the device companies’ own assessments (conflict of interest)

What can battery assessments tell us over time? 

• Starting battery percentage: Pharma providers expect devices arriving at their distribution centers or manufacturing facilities to be 100% charged and ready to go. When devices arrive, they are not 100% charged – a fundamental process issue.
• Ending battery percentage: This provides a snapshot overview of how much wiggle room the energy budget has for ping rate optimization. If shipments often end with >50% battery remaining, companies can likely improve recording or reporting rates and generate more granular data about their networks.
• The range between starting battery and ending battery percentage over time, mode of transportation and route complexity provides CONTEXT needed to quantify how much improvement to recording and reporting rates is justified based on the outlined variables. Route complexity is important to watch for, as the number of legs/waypoints and the mix of static to in-transit legs can drain the battery differently than less complex routes.

We know that pharma manufacturers try to evaluate some of these aspects of device performance. 

The challenge is that everyone is on their best behavior during the courting (RFP) process. Data is truly limited during an RFP process—getting 50 devices to function properly across 5 lanes differs from doing it at scale with 10,000 devices and 750 lanes. 

Once the RFP process is over, little is understood about how devices are performing dynamically and at scale, and that’s why problems arise. Companies need a systematic and scalable way of capturing device performance over time and need to do this agnostically.

PAXAFE helps build trust between pharmaceutical companies and the folks who supply their tracking devices. We're here to make sure pharmaceutical companies can pick the best possible device before they sign on the dotted line. On the flip side, we give device makers a clear picture of where they might need to improve so they can focus on getting even better. It's a win-win!

If you’re evaluating sensor providers and need a device-agnostic understanding of how devices perform at scale, schedule a 30-minute discovery session now.