Keeping Medical Devices Delivery Going During a Pandemic

Challenge

As part of the measures to curb the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, domestic flights from Bangkok to other provinces were suspended in Thailand. This was a huge challenge for us to ensure that we were able to deliver life-saving and urgent medical devices to these provinces and restricted areas outside Bangkok.

In Thailand, the agreed service level agreement for urgent and life-saving orders to the North, Northeast, and South provinces is within 24-hour after an order is received.

Approach

To overcome the logistics and transportation challenge, we had to rethink and reinvent a new model to deliver the medical devices to those locations using our existing distribution networks and healthcare transport fleet.

We have a fleet leaving the main distribution center (DC) in Bangkok to the UPC region every day that reaches our nine distribution hubs and spokes within 24-hours. They are then unloaded and prepared to re-deliver essential medical supplies within the same day by four-wheel-drive trucks.

From this, we established a special fleet to cater to the urgent and lifesaving medical supplies directly from the DC in Bangkok to hospitals and patients in the UPC region. This allowed us to roll out the TMS to track deliveries for all urgent and life-saving orders.

We also placed a transport coordinator to be on hand round-the-clock to connect with the clients and customers to ensure that all their requests are met.

By the time we started the special fleet, our drivers were already fully vaccinated and were following the regulations by performing weekly antigen tests to ensure that they were safe and healthy to perform their tasks, as well as keeping the communities we serve safe. DKSH was the only distributor to have received a certificate from the DDC in Thailand to deliver medical products and services during the COVID-19 curfew period.

Result

Throughout the pandemic period, we were able to ensure that all medical devices, especially for emergencies and urgent orders, were delivered on time without any impact on our customers’ operations.

This meant that patients were able to continue their treatment and medical care despite the movement control and curfew in Thailand.