UPS has announced further service enhancements for existing and new healthcare and life science customers. UPS will offer a new portfolio of tech-enabled sensing and monitoring solutions to help with the highest-quality visibility, tracking and management options for critical healthcare shipments. In addition, all UPS healthcare operations will align under an innovative, technology-driven quality management and certification system to help meet high-quality operating standards and to simplify performance verification. To accomplish this, UPS is forming a dedicated Healthcare and Life Sciences (HCLS) unit.
The UPS Premier product line will provide differentiated levels of service for healthcare customers. It will leverage UPS’s Smart Global Logistics Network package tracking capabilities, combined with new, next-generation, on-package sensor technology to enable priority flow paths, sortation, contingency actions and delivery services for critical healthcare shipments. This new portfolio will provide UPS’ most comprehensive priority-handling services for chain of custody, time-dependent and temperature-sensitive packages to help increase on-time reliability.
“We’re giving customers an exceptional amount of visibility and security for their most critical healthcare and life sciences shipments,” said David Abney, chairman and CEO. “With these technologies and processing plans, we will have greater flexibility to protect these urgent packages along the ‘chain of custody’, provide contingency solutions and ensure best-in-class service reliability.”
This solution is part of an expansive effort UPS is undertaking to retrofit UPS’s facility network with smart, IoT systems to track healthcare packages. These technology-enabled solutions are scheduled to come online Q1 2020. “Dependable and reliable service levels are important for critical healthcare and life sciences shipments, no matter the situation,” Abney said. “And these solutions will enable UPS to deliver just that.”
Healthcare customers rely on best-in-class UPS quality management systems for storage, inventory management and distribution of healthcare products, particularly those which are subject to current Good Manufacturing Practices (cGMP). The UPS quality management system has been re-designed to reflect systems that exist today at many pharmaceutical companies. The QMS features a cloud-based electronic document management system, global standard operating procedures (SOPs), best-in-class validation processes and global reporting tools.
The decision to connect all UPS healthcare operations and commercial groups within a single UPS HCLS unit is a product of extensive collaboration with customers and industry experts to understand how UPS can better provide tailored services while rapidly responding to healthcare-specific needs. The unit supports operations and over 5,000 personnel from Marken, Polar Speed and all 114 UPS healthcare facilities.
The unit will have a dedicated and healthcare-trained salesforce and customer support teams for customers across the UPS global network. Global healthcare operations will be harmonized and enhanced to meet rigorous quality standards and service levels. In all aspects UPS HCLS will build on its customer-first focus.
