As a healthcare company that sends critically important, and sometimes irreplaceable packages, we’re sure you and your patients have felt the sting of distressed shipments. You’ve likely felt the deeper sting that you simply don’t have 100% control over all your shipments, all the time.
This becomes especially apparent during the holiday season, where consumerism is at its peak. Consequently, so is carrier activity. Which can then translate into — you guessed it — the infamous phenomenon of carrier holiday peak service failures.
Although your business isn’t operating outside its normal scope, your carrier’s business is, leaving you and your packages at risk.
Even more stressful is knowing that a Christmas gift might take priority over a time-sensitive, sometimes even life-saving package. (Hopefully Uncle Ron enjoyed his new HDTV, because it bumped Janine’s lab specimen and Marco’s home infusion therapy).
Thankfully, we’re out of the holiday peak. This means you can finally catch your breath and explore solutions.
So how can healthcare companies avoid distressed packages and shipment emergencies? There’s a 
two-pronged approach:
- The #1 way to prevent a distressed package: don’t ship into a distressed location in the first place.
- The #1 way to mitigate distress that already has occurred: get an early detection plan. The sooner you’re aware of any inkling of a problem, the more time and options you have to remedy it.
Let’s talk about these concepts and how ParcelShield provides advanced early detection services for healthcare companies that need it most.
Preventing Distressed Packages
If you don’t want distressed packages, don’t ship into distressed zones.
You might be thinking, “That sounds far too simple for a really tough problem.”
You’re right. It’s not easy to accomplish this.
It takes a high level of resources, diligence, and attention to track service level performance in real-time. The fact that UPS and FedEx shipments are only 96.2% on-time means that one out of every 26 packages becomes distressed. If you ask us, that number is too high when so much is on the line. On top of that, things get exponentially more complicated when you factor in the unpredictable nature of Mother Nature — and holiday snow storms. Oh boy … those snow storms.
That’s why ParcelShield is built on the perfect balance between man and machine: sophisticated software that incorporates artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and predictive analytics, alongside a dedicated team of data scientists and support members to give each shipment the attention it deserves.
Which brings us to our next point …
Mitigating Distress through Early Detection
The hard truth is this: no matter how cutting-edge your technology is, Mother Nature still has the upper hand. There are a million things that can go wrong on any given day. This means it’s critical to stay on top of them.
One of the main tools used to track packages includes carrier scans as the package moves along its intended route. But there’s a big hole here — and that’s the lack of early detection capabilities.
Simply put: if you’re relying on carrier scans alone to alert you to package problems, you’re not going to find out there’s a problem until it’s too late to do anything about it.
This is why so much of our operations at ParcelShield are geared toward early detection.
When you have systems and tools in place to see even the smallest abnormality in a shipment’s intended route, you have an incredible amount of power. If you want to get poetic about it, you can change its (the shipment’s) destiny.
If you don’t want to get poetic about it, you can nip the problem in the bud, saving time, money, and well-being for everyone involved.
You can’t be a fortune teller, but early detection technology is a pretty darn good runner-up.
Are You Equipped for Early Detection?
Package distresses are not isolated to carrier holiday peak service failures or extreme weather events. On any given day, your patient may not be home to accept a package. Even though you scheduled this critical delivery with them a few days ago … life happens. This is just one of multiple everyday package distresses that ParcelShield can help you with, in addition to the extreme service interruptions.
ParcelShield can help you avoid or mitigate a full list of shipment headaches by:
- Analyzing historical and real-time weather and carrier performance data
- Using this data to assess the impact on carrier routes for all modes of transport and predict potential distress
- Taking immediate action to mitigate distress, like rerouting packages and recovering sensitive parcels
- Providing first-response notifications to your team and your customers on changes that impact them
Get a free demo today to learn more about ParcelShield’s system and services, and how we can help you say goodbye to the avoidable complications of distressed packages.
