Case Study

Thermo Fisher Assures Quality and Compliance for Over 570K+ Shipments Per Year

With ParkourSC, Thermo Fisher Patheon Pharma Services track quality in real time for over 6100+ clinical trials

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“We’ve partnered with ParkourSC to enable our real-time track and trace service offering for our customers and what that does is it not only allows us to track the temperature of our products that’s going out the door that eventually reaches a patient. But it also helps us enable that visibility that we need across the value chain.”

Sarah Englert,
Director of Digital Innovation, Thermo Fisher

Decreasing Supply Chain Cycle Time

Thermo Fisher Scientific’s mission is to enable our customers to make the world healthier, cleaner and safer. We are focused on quickly bringing new medicines and therapies to market. For Thermo Fisher Pharma Services, this means decreasing the supply chain cycle time from sourcing to patient delivery for clinical trials and personalized medicines.

There is a market shift in clinical trials where before, patients would go to the main hospital or research facility to be part of a trial, but now clinical trials are decentralized. Clinical trials come to the patient, so the patient needs visibility into the supply chain. What and when are the medicines coming?

Thermo Fisher works on more than 6,100 clinical trials annually. The faster clinical trials are completed and analyzed, the faster a medicine goes to market. So decreasing the supply chain cycle time with visibility across the supply chain is crucial to get new medicines to market.

Build End-to-End Visibility and Connectivity

Their first step with ParkourSC was to take all the siloed data from various internal systems, temperature data loggers, excel spreadsheets, and carrier tracking data and connect them to the ParkourSC platform. This created one source of truth for the entire organization and its customers. Because ParkourSC uses a data lake, they can ingest any type of data structure and analyze them all and provide cross-functional data insights. After implementation, they could review the orders, inventory, location milestones, and real-time temperatures and provide alerts and notifications to their internal organization, hospitals, clinic, doctors, or the patient themselves.

570K+

tracked shipments per year

100+

global sites tracked in platform

4000X

time improvement for fit-for-use confirmation (3 days to 1 minute)

Bridge the Chasm Between Strategic Planning and Real-World Supply Chain Operations

Confirm Shipment Excursion in Minutes

One massive benefit of ParkourSC that Scott Emery, General Manager of Transportation for Thermo Fisher Scientific, noted was the real-time temperature tracking of parcels, not big shipments, but individual parcels. Previously, Thermo Fisher Scientific used passive data loggers in each parcel to track the temperature during shipment. After the parcel was delivered, the dataloggers would need to be collected from the patient or final destination, and the temperature data uploaded to their central quality system to confirm there were no temperature excursions in transit. Because these shipments may have gone to more rural areas, the fit-for-use confirmation could take anywhere from 12 hours to 3 days; hence the patient would wait to see if they could take the shipped medicine. Now with real-time temperature monitoring with ParkourSC and the sensing devices, Thermo Fisher Scientific and the patient know in a minute if there were any temperature excursions and if they can take that shipped medicine.

Industry

Contract Development and Manufacturing Organization (CDMO)

Thermo Fisher Pharm Services provides end-to-end services for drug development, including API, biologics, viral vector services, cGMP plasmids, early- and late-phase development, clinical trial solutions, logistics services, and commercial manufacturing.

Create a Self-Driving, Automated Supply Chain

Thermo Fisher Scientific’s next goal for the ParkourSC platform is to go beyond visibility to what Sarah Englert, Director of Digital Innovation at Thermo Fisher Scientific calls a “Self-Driving, Automated Supply Chain.” They are working with ParkourSC to add business logic to the platform so it can proactively take action on issues as they arise. They will be creating and utilizing a Digital Twin of their supply chain to model changes and determine the impact quickly to solve issues in real-time.

“We’ve built the foundation with ParkourSC, and we will continue to partner with them on building our logic and execute proactive actions to improve our supply chain speed and flexibility while also meeting the demands of the pharmaceutical innovator and their patients.”

Sarah Englert,

Director of Digital Innovation, Thermo Fisher

Customer Testimonial

Sarah Englert
Director of Digital Innovation, Thermo Fisher Clinical Trials

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