Solution Spotlight: Supply chain and logistics visibility technology
Tive is a global leader in supply chain and logistics visibility technology. 1,000 global shippers, logistics service providers, and retailers use Tive to monitor shipment location and condition in real time, gain actionable insights, and ensure end-customer satisfaction. Tive’s cloud platform, patented sensor technology, and 24/7 monitoring services reduce excursions and delays, minimise rejected loads, and decrease theft, damage, and spoilage - because every shipment matters.
What problem or status quo deficiency are you solving?
The world of pharma logistics has been limited to identifying temperature excursions that cause medicines to degrade. If excursions happen, these medicines go to waste and need to be replaced. The pharmaceutical industry has taken time to evaluate new technologies that provide real-time temperature monitoring, and which enable them to be proactive in the event of excursions. Real-time tracking enables customers to monitor temperature and other causes of damage, and to proactively take action in case of excursions - helping save medicines before they are compromised. To support this, Tive recently announced the Solo Pro, a validated, real-time visibility tracker for biologics and pharmaceutical shipments, designed to streamline product releases, reduce excursions, achieve compliance, and protect product integrity from point of origin to point of delivery.
What has made this problem challenging to address in the past?
The pharmaceutical industry is very conservative, and change in management control is difficult to initiate and implement. As such, the industry has been a late adopter of new technologies. It is also highly regulated, and approved and validated processes are difficult to change - and evaluating new technologies takes a lot of time. The pharma supply chain is quite robust, and disruptions are rare, which has not built an urgency to find new methods of cold chain management. Recently, however, disruptions are becoming the norm, and pharma logistics companies have been forced to evaluate more efficient ways to monitor the integrity of medicines.
What new innovations does your solution bring to bear on these challenges?
New sensing technology enables customers to monitor not only temperature, but to detect when medicine is mishandled, which could risk integrity. Geolocalisation also empowers shippers to have better control over the safest, most effective routes - reducing the risk of delays, loss, theft, and counterfeiting. In addition, as information and alerts are captured in real time, teams can proactively take action to save shipments. This is handled by logistic providers, but the Tive team can also actively intervene in the event of route deviations or excursions.
How does your solution work?
Tive’s IoT devices capture real-time temperature, humidity, shock, light, tilt, and geolocalisation, and this data is available to LSPs and/or pharmaceutical manufacturers in the Tive platform. Alerts can be set to warn that an incident has occurred, and alerts are immediately sent to stakeholders to empower action. Users can also perform post-shipment analysis to improve the efficiency of their supply chain. Finally, if a customer requires it, we provide 24/7 Managed Services to monitor a specific shipment and take action in case any alerts take place.
What makes your solution stand out in the market?
The logistics world today is 24/7, taking proactive action in case of incidents, and ensuring that Tive’s real-time, IoT device connectivity is reliable - and global - is crucial. To achieve this, Tive has achieved device approval on 170+ air carriers, as well as across countries, cities, and airports, and global connectivity agreements are also essential. Because sustainability is becoming more important, Tive includes a reverse logistics programme, the Tive Green Program, in the United States and Europe, with further global expansion plans underway. Finally, we have sold more than two million Tive trackers, and have gathered immense amounts of data that contribute to shipment optimisation.
How would you quantify the economic ROI of your solution?
Sometimes, saving even one shipment can save a company 100x on its investment. Tive not only monitors shipments in real time, users are empowered to take proactive action when alerted to an event that could damage product integrity. On average, 8% of shipments (across all industries) experience problems with damage, loss, and theft - all of which create waste and financial losses. Real-time visibility tools like Tive significantly reduce this percentage, and your ROI can be easily calculated and well justified.
What do your customers have to say about this solution?
We have received extremely positive feedback about our new Solo Pro trackers, in part because the device was designed using input from customers, which are not only specialty LSPs, but also pharmaceutical and biologics manufacturers. We also took into consideration biotech companies specialising in cell & gene therapies, which have extra complex supply chains. Users are saying that the Solo Pro is the most sophisticated - and easy to operate - device available on the market. Customers also praise the continuous improvement of Tive’s platform, which enables customers to manage their shipments in real time, and the ability to use historical shipment data to optimise future shipments. The general response has been excitement, as the Solo Pro not only enables pharma companies to protect shipments, it also accelerates releases seamlessly and safely.
About Tive
Tive is the global leader in supply chain and logistics visibility technology. More than 1,000 global shippers, logistics service providers, and retailers use Tive to monitor shipment location and condition in real time, gain actionable insights, and ensure end-customer satisfaction. Tive’s cloud platform, patented sensor technology, and 24/7 Live Monitoring services reduce excursions and delays, minimize rejected loads, and decrease theft, damage, and spoilage. Customers count on Tive to ensure that shipments are delivered on time and in full—because every shipment matters. For more information, visit www.tive.com.
