Meeting Key Performance Indicators

by Tony Jones, CEO, One Nucleus

When we think about life sciences at a company, cluster or industry level, the overriding goal of all stakeholders is value creation. How one defines value or performance is perspective dependent to a large degree depending on an individual’s role. For some it is the creation of monetary value in terms of whether there is a return on investment. For some it will be the scientific and technical value of progressing a hypothesis-driven innovation to proof-of-concept and knowledge generation, and some will look at economic development in terms of job creation in their region. Absolutely the dominant motivator of value creation I find that is common to all stakeholders is a feeling the true value is in seeing the translation of ideas into innovative products and services that lead to better patient outcomes. There is no mutual exclusivity between the narrow role-dependent definition and collective goal in my view. From day-to-day an individual stakeholder may be focussed on enabling or achieving their specific Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) whilst knowing that achievement against those KPIs is how they can best contribute to the much larger goal of addressing unmet medical needs.

Much debate, writing and presentation time is spent on the innovative science and technology, or investment strategies, being pursued to create new medicines. Somewhat less time, apart from perhaps in niche cohorts of the sector, is spent discussing challenges, innovation and advances in the areas enabling research and development. One such area is logistics. An area that may be considered less exciting or newsworthy for the majority in the R&D sector, yet an effective means to move materials around, whether between research labs, clinical trial sites or from manufacturing site to patient is critical. I was delighted therefore on a recent call to be able to discuss this topic with Tushar Madani and Michael O’Kane from one of the sector’s newer entrants, CoolReach Logistics to gain some insight to what they are doing to play their part in our collective aim of improving patient outcomes.

CoolReach sets out  its mission as providing personalised logistics services that empower life sciences & clinical trial businesses to go above and beyond in serving the purpose of improving patient health. In an era of development of increasingly precise and advanced medicines, this would seem to be a great goal to achieve their KPIs to fulfil their  mission to become the UK’s most reliable cold-chain logistics partner – providing life sciences and  clinical trial businesses with high-quality insight, personalisation, and innovation to consistently improve patients’ lives.

How do you think about logistics?
The duo explained how the starting point for CoolReach is the belief that every shipment being different, so the precision approach being driven by acknowledging how each customer’s product is unique and their role as the experts is to enable R&D scientists to consider the ‘what if’ scenarios. Moreover, not just thinking about the ‘what if’, but having a plan to deal with that occurrence should it happen. It is often said of legal contracts that it is much easier to spot the things you don’t like than to spot the things that aren’t there. It’s an experience factor. I came away feeling the same about logistics planning. Experience helps you predict what might go wrong and hence how to deal with it. The key message being not to take logistics for granted when products, nature and geopolitics can all create disruption.

What have been the biggest changes in the past five years?
As with any technical service provision, to remain relevant, competitive and effective for customers innovation is key. I was keen to hear what the CoolReach team saw as the biggest changes in the logistics field and how they have adapted to and embraced those changes.

Tushar set out how he saw the biggest changes being in the advent of technologies, whether on the technical side or the business and customer interface side. On the customer interface, speed, convenience and real-time data are valued not just for efficiency or peace of mind, but for compliance with the expectations of regulators who wish to see robust data on provenance and stability of a product. It was clear CoolReach are as into technology as everyone else when it comes to new modes of tracking shipments globally, monitoring temperatures and being ready to intervene should one of those ‘what if’ moments occur. To this end, they have recently created their proprietary customer portal where instant quotes and such real-time tracking are enabled for all shipments.

Keen to understand how CoolReach see themselves in the highly competitive logistics space, particularly the SMEs who form such a large proportion of the life science innovation ecosystem, I explored how CoolReach tailors its approach. Encouragingly, Tushar explained how they see themselves as a provider who stands ready to help the SMEs who perhaps have limited experience in the intricacies of cold chain logistics. This includes training of the customer’s employees on technical aspects of packaging and required documentation and SOPs in cross border movement of goods. Michael expanded further on how they stay abreast of the SMEs needs and knowledge gaps in areas such as evolving logistics technologies and changing sustainability or regulatory demands being placed on SMEs. Key to this is building strong and trustworthy relationships which CoolReach have, and continue to, achieve through initiatives such as their series of Breakfast Connect Sessions around the UK, engaging in platforms like the One Nucleus Genesis conference, surveys and spending time with scientists to get to know and understand their needs. Demonstration perhaps of the effectiveness of that customer engagement groundwork is the openness and detailed questions they receive in feedback from these engagements, allowing them to feel confident they are well informed and current in the support needed to ensure customers of all sizes are choosing the best options for their product and ticking all the right boxes to derisk their products’ journeys.

What’s on the horizon?   
Much as it is clear how CoolReach have adopted innovation to meet customer needs today, the sector continues to evolve, so it was an opportune moment for me to seek their expert views on what challenges might lie ahead for our One Nucleus member companies. How many times do we hear the phrase ‘cash is king’? It’s a cliché for a reason, especially when raising investment or securing deals remains challenging. It was reassuring to hear Tushar’s candid view that one of the challenges companies will face going forward is rising costs. Our sector is not immune to macroeconomics of fuel surcharges, wage rises and perhaps higher tariffs on goods, but it’s good to know as a provider CoolReach has this front of mind as they consider what is best for each customer and how to mitigate some elements, whilst encouraging customers not to follow a false economy of less speciality options.

Key is the approach to build the journey team before the go trigger on any project. Whether it is the airport hangar teams and airlines, compliance advisers, road haulage company (and their breakdown cover), packaging providers or other, assembling the relay team for an online kick-off meeting and enabling all participants to then access their portal to check progress in real-time is key to not just resilience, but also avoiding unexpected remedial costs later where that preparatory work is not so thorough. The engagement approach CoolReach are taking is what is striking. Not trying to be all things to everyone in logistics, but genuinely learning about each project and product, which enables this end-to-end team to be assembled and avoids the pitfalls of the false economies of low upfront cost that may later come back to bite you. CoolReach are confident they differentiate themselves in the market by being a first-rate specialty courier for speciality shipments. There may be cheaper options for less sensitive or precious products.

Brand value
At the end of what was a very enjoyable and insightful conversation, I was interested to understand what they felt the brand of CoolReach stood for and what three words they would like to be known for. Tushar led the answer suggesting the three words would be ‘trust’, ‘expertise’ and ‘disruptive’.

Connecting Our One Nucleus ‘Village’?
I enjoyed exploring the ever-changing world of logistics. We all know how challenging the journey from ideation and hypothesis for a new medicine to a new and more effective product making it to a global patient base can be. R&D informs us what works and what doesn’t and sometimes we just have to accept the experimental results are not what we hoped for, the hypothesis disproved. It is often pointed out that it takes a village to raise a child. The same is true in new medicines research and development I feel. The village here is an ecosystem and all the support, insights, skills, capacities and connections a good ecosystem can bring to help one innovator’s baby grow and develop. One Nucleus aims to connect our ecosystem, not because it can stop some programmes failing, but we connect the different elements to hopefully reduce the risk of programmes failing for the wrong reasons.

Returning to my opening remarks of this article around each stakeholder achieving their own KPIs to ensure value is added to the collective aim of creating better medicines, I feel I learned during this conversation that the true value of engaging experts in logistics for our members is that it then means CoolReach are worrying about the logistics allowing the scientists tostay focussed on worrying about the science. Each therefore honed to achieve their KPIs which is good for everyone. 

Check Out The Full Interview
It was a delight learning more about logistics from Tushar and Michael and there was much more shared than I have described here in this short read with the full (25mins) recording available on the One Nucleus YouTube channel