LogiPharma Europe 2024: Niklas Adamsson Discusses Ways to Improve Visibility and Risk Management for Cold Chain Shipping

PC: How can data and digital tools help improve visibility and risk management when it comes to cold chain shipping?

Adamsson: I think data is the key for the industry moving forward from several dimensions. It's not only about risk, but about sustainability and cost control. We have to be holistic when it comes to the balancing act of these three factors, where data is going to be playing a vital role in being successful. We have both data pre-shipment, meaning risk mitigation, doing trade analysis based on historical data. Is this the right choice or do you need to change? When you have a new lane coming up, how should you deal with that? So that's kind of using data, pre-shipment in evaluating this situation. Then of course, data and visibility is key during shipment. In this kind of volatile world that we live in with all these potential disruptions, we need to act fast as an industry. If something comes up, the ability to act is based on live data, which is crucial to the product. With post-shipment, we need to do a root cause analysis. In that case, data is vital, because we need to understand what happened. You can really see how data plays a vital role before, during, and after the shipment. From our perspective, we use data also for our internal purposes, because we capture data from our equipment every 10 minutes. We use that based on machine learning AI to develop predictive maintenance algorithms, which means that we are being more efficient and maintaining our fleet, making sure that we are able to respond even faster to our customers.

PC: Could you discuss the growing focus on sustainability and the importance of reducing emissions in the pharma supply chain?

Adamsson: I think sustainability is one of the key elements for everybody here. It's our responsibility not only for our generation, but for future generations. For us, sustainability is twofold. First, it's about about being able to provide the most sustainable equipment to the market, making sure that we maximize the payload, minimize the weight, making sure that we provide the most sustainable solution. Second, it's about how you operate. We need to make sure the scope three emissions are as low as possible. What's in our control is making sure that our customers can avoid doing unnecessary empty container repositioning. That's why we launched our one way program, which means that our customers can more or less pick up a unit anywhere in the world and drop it off anywhere. By avoiding empty container repositioning, which is not good for a sustainability material, we are able to leverage our global network to make sure that those units are used instead of being moved empty. So I think sustainability is really one of the key aspects. But coming back to what I mentioned before is that the balancing act between sustainability, cost and risk, I think it's dangerous to only focus on sustainability. Because if you only look at sustainability, you may actually lose your focus on risk and cost control. However, if you do it with a more structured holistic approach, focusing on sustainability, you actually may be able to minimize the risk as well. But you now need to kind of have a balanced view on it. The risk is that if you only focus on sustainability this year, in a few years, you're gonna see costs increasing, because you left that behind. However, these three are highly interconnected. If you're smart dealing with sustainability, you will be able to address risks, as well as address cost control.