March 25, 2021 – To cope with the supply chain volatility brought on by the pandemic, more manufacturers and suppliers are scaling up the use of tracking technology to ensure critical medical shipments arrive on time and intact.
Cardinal Health Inc. (Dublin, OH) began working with freight-tracking software startup FourKites Inc. (Chicago, IL) in March 2020 on a pilot to track shipments of PPE between manufacturing plants and the company’s distribution centers, reports the New York Times.
Cardinal had been looking at visibility technology before the pandemic because it wanted to give its customers the kind of detailed tracking information consumers expect from other industries such as ride-sharing services.
FourKites announced this week that it has raised a $100 million Series D round that brings its total capital raised to over $200 million.
FourKites said the funding would help the company develop more features and functions, such as the ability to track products in warehouses and in stores, and to expand into new markets such as China. The company also wants to extend visibility further upstream in the supply chain, so customers can track, for example, the availability of raw materials.
Over the past year, FourKites and Cardinal have built a customized system to track temperature-sensitive medical products, and Cardinal has expanded use of the technology across all its domestic transport modes, including trucking and air transportation, according to the report.
During last month’s severe winter weather across the U.S., Cardinal used the technology to track a truckload of pharmaceutical supplies bound for a hospital in New Orleans from Jackson, Miss. “The freeway was shut down, the truck was pulled over on the side,” said Sean Halligan, SVP of pharmaceutical supply chain for Cardinal. The new technology meant that Cardinal could alert the customer when the shipment was moving again.