While attending the UNOs Region 5 meeting this year, doctors brought the topic of Hep-C patients and kidney transplants to the forefront of the conversation. Would you believe that there are about 97,000 people in the USA who are waiting for a kidney transplant? And when I say waiting, I mean waiting. How about more than five years? Yes. Five years or more.
It is hard to predict the speed at which technology will impact logistics dramatically. From Geo-tagging capabilities to autonomous robots, technology will have enormous impacts on the logistics industry as a whole. Application Programming Interfaces or APIs will be at the center of connecting all these features into a single management system.
In 2015, the EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) was the core of advanced transportation management systems, but it is becoming irrelevant. Shipping APIs are taking over the shipping industry, becoming the most tech practice among shippers. In a research conducted with 200 supply chain managers, 85% are using EDI, but 43% were unsatisfied with them. 55% of the respondents believe APIs is a practical option to use instead of the EDI. The main reasons for the replacement are the need to function in real time, compatibility to use competitive TAT, and big data tech compared to EDIs.
Transporting medical shipments such as organs, tissues, and blood is a time sensitive process that leaves no room for error.
Almost every business today has shipping needs whether it be buying products or selling products, and knowing where your packages are has traditionally been provided through lagging milestone updates. Traditionally, lagging milestone updates are when couriers only update the shipper after a package has reached a certain point. This means that you only get notified after packages pass certain checkpoints, or milestones, in the delivery process.
It is a known fact that digital platforms play a crucial role in the customer shopping experience. According to a survey done by Google, over 80% of all shoppers do their shopping online. It is also a game-changing fact that more than 70% of the world’s population own phones.
In no other industry is shipping more critical than in the life sciences field where shipments of blood, tissue, or organs can often mean the life or death of a patient. It is imperative for hospitals and clinics that deal with these types of shipments to work with a shipping company that has cutting-edge technology for added visibility into where the package is at all time.
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