Panalpina to increase GDP-certification across its business units

March 21, 2018: Realising the importance of maintaining product quality and safety of pharmaceuticals in the supply chain, Panalpina has initiated strong initiatives to increase the number of GDP-certification in all its business units, across the globe.

This will help Panalpina to meet expectations of its healthcare customers.

According to the company, pharmaceutical companies largely require their business units that handle pharma products are complaint with Good Distribution Practice (GDP), which sets various guidelines for proper distribution of medicinal products for human use.

Currently, 70 business units of Panalpina around the world are GDP-compliant. Out of these, 30 are GDP-certified, and the number is on the rise. The GDP quality assurance standard, includes stringent requirement to handle, storage and distribution of pharmaceutical products.

“With increasingly global supply chains, and the emergence of high-value products, there is a growing demand for strict quality and temperature-control measures to ensure safety and integrity of pharmaceutical products across long-distance deliveries,” said Andreas Sahli, global head of industry vertical healthcare, Panalpina.

“Stakeholders across the supply chain can rely on us to deliver GDP-compliant transport, storage and distribution solutions worldwide,” said Sahli.

Panalpina holds thousands of trainings on GDP topics every year, and around 3,000 employees are currently GDP-qualified.

In 2018, Panalpina is expected to roll out its own GDP training materials, and will continue its program to qualify its staff. It will help the company to expand its capabilities and knowledge.

Quality management is key to Panalpina’s success. Its quality, health, safety and environment (QHSE) team performs 40-50 GDP audits every year, and look for opportunities to improve its established processes and standards, and identifies systemic issues, which requires attention.

“When a non-conformance is identified, a root-cause analysis is performed immediately to identify the origin of the issue, and a corrective action plan is developed,” said Lindsay Zingg, global head of QHSE, Panalpina.

SYSTEMATIC SUBCONTRACTOR MANAGEMENT

As an asset light organisation, Panalpina is critically dependent on the performance of its subcontractors, and their adherence to the agreed processes and procedures. As part of its environmental, quality and safety management systems, Panalpina also conducts rigorous subcontractor audits, whereby the working standards and corporate controls of subcontractors are assessed regularly.

The audits, include environmental performance standards, and adherence to labor and human rights performance. In 2017, 266 subcontractor audits were performed.

Panalpina is using ‘Validaide’, a new online platform to qualify its key suppliers and make lane-risk assessments, especially for the healthcare industry.

On the open platform, customers and suppliers are connected to standardise and improve supplier qualification for different product categories and transport modalities.

In 2018, Validaide will be further rolled out to continue to leverage advantages of the system.