Overview

Pharmaceutical manufacturers today are accelerating away from over-the-counter pill-based medications towards more structurally-complex biotechnology drugs, including hormones and cancer drugs, that require strict temperature and quality controls when shipped.

With so much cargo in transit, however, airlines are often prone to neglect required handling for time-and temperature-sensitive pharmaceuticals.

Delays during transfer, shock and vibration in transit, extreme weather variations and equipment failures can result in temperature excursions and product loss.

For many pharmaceuticals, a two-degree variation in Celsius temperature is all that's needed to spoil the entire shipment.

EZR routinely sends experienced inspectors to airports to serve as the "eyes and ears" of the Pharma company and take extra special care of their high-value shipments.

Inspectors receive and inspect time-and temperature-sensitive cargo, take remedial action if necessary, and personally clear the cargo through customs and onto Cold Chain vehicles.

This level of personal service is crucial to maintaining product integrity, but it was a cumbersome spreadsheet and email-based reporting system that involved a lot of manual tracking and paperwork to keep all parties informed.

EZR Group commissioned Blood & Treasure to design and develop a technology solution to enable compliant tracking and reporting processes and provide their clients with total visibility into every shipment.

Key features of the platform would include:

• Mobile interface and admin panel
• Integrated flight tracking for 182 airlines
• Live on-site reporting
• Secure, two-way messaging
• Real-time analytics for every shipment

Ultimately, we needed to provide EZR's team of cargo inspectors with an easy and efficient way to manage and report on shipments in real-time, and also provide EZR management and clients with secure admin access to drill down to the details of each shipment while it was in transit.

After one of our project managers had spent time with an EZR inspector team in JFK Airport in New York, we had a fairly good idea of their workflow, and the outline to a system that would improve it.

There is an incredible amount of detail to be accounted for when shipping Cold Chain products overseas - from shipper waybills to customs clearance forms and inspector reports - with each product category being slightly different in terms of the paperwork required.

We needed to capture every product flow in the wireframes, which took six weeks to complete. When the wireframes were signed off on and each task had been analyzed in Jira, we were able to quickly proceed into writing the API and creating the data schema, the last remaining steps before going into code. Development time took 3 months to complete.

As we were working with multiple different types of flows, depending on the product being shipped, we architected the platform in such a way that each report was held on the frontend and uploaded all at once when the inspector completed it. This caused some issues with uploads, particularly when signal strength on the inspector's phone was low.

It would have been better to have structured each page of a report to be a self-contained module and to auto-upload to the server instead of waiting for the entire report to be complete before uploading. We arrived at this solution after the first few test builds which necessitated an easy enough revision to the API.

Overall, we are proud of the work we did on EZR Today and are looking forward to adding more advanced functionality to the platform in future development sprints.