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Importance of Shipment Tracking for Pharmaceutical Companies
Introduction
The growth of digital healthcare platforms like 1Mg and Apollo Pharmacy has made ordering medicine as simple as buying groceries. As a result, Millennials and GenZ consumers are rapidly adopting e-pharmacies. The appeal lies in competitive pricing and advantageous home deliveries, making healthcare accessible from anywhere and increasing customer convenience.
A Pwc report confirms that 50% of urban consumers consider delivery times before placing an order from any e-pharmacies. However, pharmaceutical supply chains remain complex and the rise of on-demand delivery has made it even more intricate. This is where shipment tracking becomes crucial. By offering order visibility, you can ensure timely deliveries, enhance customer convenience, and maintain consumer trust.
In this article, we highlight the importance of pharmaceutical shipment tracking and what you can do to establish a robust tracing and tracking system. Let’s start!
Importance of Shipment Tracking for Pharmaceutical Companies
Digital integration of retail pharmacies with online marketplaces have transformed health systems. In response, pharmaceutical logistics are keeping pace with just-in-time delivery, advanced cold-storage solutions, and improved inventory management. However, it is shipment tracking that ensures every step is accounted for, making it crucial to the pharmaceutical ecosystem. Below are the key advantages of shipment tracking:
1. Ensure Time-Sensitive Deliveries
Pharma companies following the Direct-from-Manufacturers model sidestep traditional supply chain intermediaries, delivering drugs directly to consumers. With demand for personalized medicines on the rise, e-pharmacies have to fulfill consumer expectations like on-demand and same-day deliveries.
If you are committed to offering quick deliveries to customers and rush to bring bio-pharma products to consumers, it is critical to ensure customers have order visibility and can track riders every step of the way. Tracking shipments as soon as it is dispatched from your warehouse or the retail pharmacy keeps customers in the loop of their order journey.
2. Monitor Temperature-Controlled Shipments
Bio-pharma products are temperature-sensitive, like certain medications and vaccines. It is especially important when it comes to delivering emergency medicines to hospitals and health centers. Hence, regulating the supply chain and adhering to Good Distribution Practice becomes mandatory. This includes securing the right temperature conditions for shipments and ensuring safety to prevent contamination and damage.
However, committing to regulatory compliance requires rigorous end-to-end shipment visibility. Advanced tracking systems, enabled by IoT (Internet of Things) like RFID tags and wireless communications, allows real-time monitoring from the time each shipment is collected. With the right temperature controlled logistics system, you can trace the entire cold chain logistics trail— refrigerated trucks, reefers, and air cargo.
3. Reduce Shipment Exceptions and Errors
When medicines don’t reach consumers on-time, they don’t just lose trust in the brand but move away for good. Shipment tracking follows every minute movement of the order and keeps logistics providers accountable for their service. With an end-to-end order tracking system you can constantly monitor the flow of goods, and receive alerts of shipping exceptions as they occur.
You keep up with every minute changes, be it delivery delays or unpredictable last-mile conditions. This helps you better prepare to coordinate with your shipping partners and inform customers of any potential delays, ensuring they don’t cancel orders in frustration.
4. Create Customer-Centric Shipping Experience
Customer satisfaction is no longer simply to deliveries; it’s now tied to individual interactions with e-pharmacies. As with other e-retail sectors, pharmaceutical companies opting the digital mode have to develop beyond patient-centric healthcare models. They have to offer personalized shipping experiences. This includes flexibility in delivery options, real-time tracking on a tracking portal, and proactive communication across multiple channels.
According to a consumer survey by Pitney Bowes, 41% of all consumers prioritize estimated delivery dates and 28% want prompt SMS notifications on their orders. Building customer loyalty comes from guaranteeing that they have control over their shopping experience. You can fulfill it by offering real-time delivery updates and transparency regarding their order status.
5. Develop End-to-End Logistics Visibility
A pharmaceutical supply chain involves multiple stakeholders—manufacturers, suppliers, distributors, retailers, and logistics providers to bring medicines to consumers. To streamline logistics for the pharma company and their end-consumers, the logistics system has to be digitized. For instance, advanced technologies in asset tracking allows drug suppliers to oversee the status of their stocks at hospitals and patients’ homes.
Blockchain supports seamless and highly secure information exchange in multi-stakeholder networks, monitoring the circulation of counterfeit drugs and stopping them from entering the supply chain. End-to-end tracking coupled with AI, helps precisely identify demand centers, enabling efficient operational processes like inventory management and distribution.
6. Centralized Overview of All Carrier Performance
To deliver orders on time and in-full, e-pharmacies face many hurdles, such as maintaining temperature control, addressing last-mile delivery challenges, and adhering to strict compliance standards. To overcome these complexities, pharma eCommerce platforms rely heavily on shipping carriers that offer efficient cold chain transport, temperature-controlled cross-docking, and optimized route delivery.
This dependence makes it crucial to have a centralized system that monitors carrier performance ensuring reliability and operational efficiency. By consistently tracking carrier performance, e-pharmacies can mitigate risks and enhance delivery reliability. Having the right shipping partners will help you stay compliant with distribution regulations and establish customer trust.
7. Generate Critical Shipping Analytics
Drugs and biopharmaceutical products are sensitive and fragile, requiring special handling and careful documentation to ensure their safe delivery. With little room for error, maintaining customer satisfaction is critical. A comprehensive order tracking system provides essential shipping insights, including on-time delivery, damage rates, order accuracy, proof-of-delivery, Return-to-Origin (RTO) percentage, and customer feedback (NPS).
Monitoring carrier performance closely allows you to allocate orders to carriers more effectively, reduce costs, and address any service level agreement breaches promptly, ensuring better service and compliance.
8. Manage Order Recalls and Returns
Order recalls and returns often result from drug expiry, damage during transit, or manufacturing defects in medicines and medical devices. Medicines, being temperature-sensitive and fragile, pose particular challenges, while returned medical devices are often considered hazardous due to bio-contamination risks. To manage this, a robust returns management strategy and temperature-controlled transportation are crucial.
Tracking the movement of returned items with milestone updates, real-time shipment traceability, accurate GPS and map-based tracking ensures shipment safety and compliance. This proactive monitoring helps avoid mishaps such as accidents or contamination, ensuring the safe return of quality products to pharmacies.
9. Improve Shipment Accuracy and Reduce Losses
Shipping costs are a major expense for e-pharmacies, especially with customer expectations of free delivery. Beyond shipping fees, pharma companies also face fulfillment, packaging, fuel surcharges, and other add-on service costs. Proper shipment tracking helps reduce delivery exceptions by alerting you to failed deliveries, giving you the chance to resolve customer issues proactively. With better shipment accuracy, you can minimize losses, protect revenue, and ensure successful delivery attempts, ultimately safeguarding your bottom line.
10. Guarantee Timely Deliveries Within EDD
Estimated Delivery Dates (EDD) provide a clear timeframe for delivery, helping customers make informed purchasing decisions and allowing you to plan the fulfillment process. Shipment tracking enables you to monitor delivery progress in real time, prompt carriers to meet their EDD goals, and keep customers engaged throughout the post-purchase journey. By ensuring customers are available to receive their orders, you reduce the likelihood of Return-to-Origin (RTO) and cancellations, ultimately improving customer satisfaction.
How ClickPost Boosts Delivery Efficiency for Pharmaceutical Companies?
ClickPost is a scalable, automation-driven multi-carrier shipping management platform that integrates with 500+ global and domestic carriers in under 24 hours. Its core strength lies in real-time visibility, powered by an advanced network of APIs and webhooks. This technology allows pharma companies to monitor shipments, gain centralized insights into carrier performance, and make data-driven shipping decisions.
Additionally, ClickPost uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to allocate shipments to carriers based on performance history and unique business needs. It also leverages advanced data science models to predict dynamic, more than 90% accurate estimated delivery dates at checkout on input of destinations.
With ClickPost, e-pharmacies can offer branded, secure real-time tracking and multi-channel communication with milestone-specific updates. The platform also features an automated returns management system and failed delivery resolution. To see how ClickPost can improve your delivery efficiency, click here for a live demonstration.
Key Features of Clickpost
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Identifies the most suitable carrier as per specific business requirements
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Automates tasks like order creation, shipping label generation, order tracking, failed delivery management, and returns management.
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Provides milestone-specific delivery updates to shoppers via multiple channels
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Reduces RTO% by solving NDR cases
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Offers a branded tracking page to shoppers with personalized product recommendations
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Provides data-driven insights into every aspect of shipping
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Offers a dedicated return app for Shopify business owners, named Shopify Returns Plus.
Conclusion
The pharmaceutical industry is increasingly digitizing its supply chain and creating an ecosystem that prioritizes patient needs. With the growing demand for over-the-counter and prescription medications, medical devices, and testing kits, the need for resilient, safe, and secure logistics has never been more apparent. Real-time pharmaceutical shipment tracking is essential for ensuring on-time deliveries and maintaining customer satisfaction with e-pharmacy brands.