Pharma Company Avoids Lost Sales by Using Tive

We love sharing customer stories - here’s one that happened recently.

A Shipment With A Surprise

A Tive customer recently shipped the first delivery of a new product to North America.  Because this was a new product launch, any delay in getting product to market would result in meaningful lost revenue.  The product was scheduled to travel by ocean freight from Belgium to North America and departed Port of Antwerp as planned on January 29, 2017. On the same day, the customer checked the status of the shipment on Tive cloud-hosted software and found two surprises:

1.    The ship was at the Port of Hamburg, Germany, not a scheduled stop
2.    The refrigerated container temperature was set to 6 degrees C, not 20

The customer immediately called the shipping company to learn why the ship had stopped in Port of Hamburg and, more importantly, to require that the container be set to the correct temperature, which they confirmed through the Tive monitoring system. They also ordered replacement product in case the product proved to be compromised.

Result - Most Products Were Fine

Because the product was stored at the wrong temperature for twelve days, the customer knew they would need to check stability budget data and possibly test the product upon arrival. There were 17 products in the shipment with a market value of roughly $1.5 million. Of the 17, 6 would likely have required further testing upon arrival if the temperature had not been reset.  Of those 6, 2 were new products to market, meaning that a delay for testing would have resulted in lost revenue.

Impact - Time and Money Saved

Thanks to the Tive sensor + software solution, the customer avoided the cost and delay of retesting 6 products, as well as the lost revenue and market impact of having 2 new products late to market. In addition, the customer was able to prepare the commercial teams in advance of the delays, avoiding wasted internal effort had the temperature excursion been discovered upon delivery.