Insights
Medical device and pharmaceutical businesses rely on fast, efficient, and compliant healthcare logistics. When it comes to life-saving medications and products, you need a logistics provider with deep expertise and experience. GEODIS specializes in medical device and pharmaceutical logistics, and we provide dedicated trade consulting for all your supply chain needs.
Discover how we can bring down your costs, ensure compliance, clear products through customs, and eliminate delays.
Bringing down healthcare logistics costs
Robust healthcare logistics management can significantly lower your freight forwarding, transportation, and storage costs for medical supplies.
Freight consolidation for medical device logistics
Medical device businesses can take advantage of freight consolidation. A trade consultant will advise on the best ways to reduce your consolidation costs. We achieve this through Less than Truckload (LTL), Less than Container Load (LCL), Ocean, Air, and other space optimization approaches. This allows you to share your medical transportation costs with other clients and reduce your expenses.
Waste reduction for pharmaceutical logistics
Pharmaceutical products require strong temperature and environmental controls, which makes consolidation more difficult. More than $3 billion of pharmaceutical products are lost each year due to spoilage or non-compliance. We remove the risk of wastage through best-in-class monitoring, controls, compliance, and packaging.
GEODIS partners with specialist packaging manufacturers to keep pharmaceutical products in pristine condition throughout the supply chain. We can also ensure proper environmental conditions for all dedicated pharmaceutical logistics, including freight forwarding, customs clearance, cross-docking, transport, receipt, storage, picking, packing, and distribution.
We’ve also developed specialized cargo routes, including dedicated air freight from Europe to the US three times a week. This gives us close control over all environmental factors and ensures the fast international transportation of time-sensitive pharmaceutical products.
Tariff engineering and trade agreements for healthcare manufacturing
Tariff engineering is a powerful way to reduce medical duty costs by making changes to your manufacturing processes and finished products. Altering your manufacturing can reclassify your healthcare products into a lower tariff band, reducing the duties you will pay when importing into the US.
We also provide advice on trade agreements, quotas, countries of origin, and other factors that can significantly reduce your medical import and export costs.
Ensuring healthcare logistics compliance
Compliance is critical to healthcare logistics management, demanding adherence to strict regulations in the US and internationally. GEODIS maintains a strong global compliance program, with deep expertise across the 160+ countries where we do business.
Our highest priority is compliance—regulatory frameworks drive our operational decisions and services. This is particularly important for healthcare logistics, and we provide comprehensive licensing and permitting from US Customs and Border Protection, the Food and Drug Administration, the US Fish and Wildlife Service, and other federal agencies. This eliminates the risk of rejected products and avoids waste due to non-compliance.
We share these insights with our clients, providing comprehensive training and expertise on any changes to import, export, or other regulations. This reduces your compliance risk and ensures you can get to market quickly.
GEODIS is fully licensed and certified for healthcare logistics across our Ports of Entry. We can take care of your pharmaceutical and medical device needs, from customs clearance through to final delivery. Our distribution network ensures compliance-friendly medical deliveries direct to patients, healthcare facilities, retailers, or intermediaries.
Clearing medical goods through customs
Clearing your medical devices and pharmaceuticals through customs is one of our core services. We’re involved in the customs clearance process from day one, carrying out detailed line reviews, analyses, audits, and classifications of your paperwork and products.
Our aim is to pre-clear all of your products well before they arrive at a US Port of Entry. Our pre-clearance rates are above 99%. We clear air freight on wheels-up and ocean freight while it is five days out from its destination. Once the goods clear through customs, we provide post-entry monitoring and auditing to catch and resolve any errors or omissions and avoid any red flags from US agencies.
Our robust, proven customs clearance helps ensure the quality of your medical products and ensures they get to market quickly.
Reducing healthcare logistics delays
Medical supplies are often critical. Patients and providers may be waiting on life-saving medications, preventative vaccines, or essential medical equipment. It’s why we help you get to market, fast.
That starts with a detailed understanding of your needs. We consult closely with you to get the fundamentals right based on your exact requirements. This involves detailed risk analysis, network optimization, and contingency management. Our healthcare implementations emphasize speed without compromising on quality. We model the advantages and potential failure points for all services and engineer our solutions to mitigate any risks.
The timing and monitoring of shipments are critical. This involves global product tracking and detailed environmental monitoring. Our dedicated Control Towers provide real-time monitoring and status updates across the entire supply chain. If we detect a potential issue, we can quickly deploy resources to remove delays and protect the viability of your products.
As an example, your pharmaceutical products may need to be kept at a low temperature. If they were unloaded from a plane and delayed, this might cause a rise in temperature while they are outside cold storage. Our monitoring would detect this, and we could deploy refrigerated units to maintain the quality of your products.
Trust GEODIS as your healthcare logistics partner
GEODIS has the global expertise to streamline your healthcare logistics services. Our worldwide network spans more than 160 countries, with a dedicated workforce of 50,000 employees. Trust us to meet your commitments to your patients and customers. Get in touch with us today and discover how our trade consulting will optimize your supply chain.
