Better supply chain visibility and increasing flexibility continue to be important trends in the Life Sciences and Healthcare industry. They are essential for guaranteeing product safety and integrity. They also enable more efficient demand-driven supply chains and allow the industry to satisfy new regulatory standards as well as distribution requirements of innovative products. At the same time, they indicate the growing importance of logistics process management and outsourcing in this highly sensitive industry.

These trends, initially identified in last year’s DHL study Key Logistics Trends in Life Sciences 2020+, have been reconfirmed by participants at the DHL 2014 Global Life Sciences and Healthcare conference in Shanghai. More than 170 representatives from the world’s largest pharmaceutical and medical devices companies attended the forum.

Besides carrying out studies and surveys, DHL actively pursues an intensive dialogue with its customers in the healthcare sector. The resulting profound industry expertise allows the logistics services provider to develop reliable and flexible solutions and to act as a globally engaged Life Sciences and Healthcare industry partner.

“By developing tailored and innovative logistics services, we allow our customers to adapt to the market’s complex future challenges already today,” said Angelos Orfanos, President, Life Sciences and Healthcare, DHL Customer Solutions and Innovation.

In the latest customer survey, three-quarters of the companies in the Life Sciences and Healthcare sector confirmed the importance of better visibility and flexibly designed supply chains. At the same time, three additional core theses of the DHL study in 2013 have also become more important from the customer perspective: 58 per cent of those surveyed consider more differentiated supply chains by product categories as a highly relevant trend (2013: 48 per cent); geographically expanding their own logistics capabilities to tier two and tier three cities and rural areas were considered particularly important by 31 per cent of the interviewees (2013: 24 per cent); and a fifth of the survey participants thought that it was highly relevant to develop own-brand e-commerce frontends and distribution channels to the end consumer (2013: 13 per cent).

The survey results also included a ranking of issues the market considers to be priorities. The four issues at the top of the list were: temperature control and cold chain; cost efficiency; access to and growth in emerging markets; and compliance to regulatory requirements.

Thanks to its dedicated Life Sciences and Healthcare unit, DHL is in an excellent position to meet the increasingly challenging demands of its customers with innovative products and services. So far successfully implemented projects include, for instance, DHL Thermonet, which offers seamless temperature transparency along the entire supply chain, DHL Medical Express for transporting urgent medical or biological products, and the DHL Recall Solution to efficiently manage sensitive recall campaigns.

DHL Global forwarding is represented in Malta exclusively by BAS Limited.