On October 13, Air Cargo News reported that DHL Global Forwarding had added 6 dedicated healthcare air corridors between Europe, the United States and Asia, flown largely on its own aircraft, and said that keeping shipments inside a single network reduces handovers and increases control over the shipment. On the same day, FedEx announced an online booking portal for temperature controlled pharmaceutical shipments across 26 European markets. 2 large operators, in the same week, built products around the same idea: fewer hands on the box.
The idea matters because of a class of healthcare freight where cost is not the objective at all. A patient's biopsy, a clinical trial sample, a batch of cell therapy manufactured from a single patient's own cells: these have no replacement cost because they have no replacement. If the shipment fails, the cost is a repeat procedure, a delayed diagnosis, a lost trial endpoint, or a patient who does not get treated. The optimization problem for that freight is not minimize cost subject to a service level. It is minimize the probability of loss, with cost as a constraint.
Loss compounds at every handover
Every handover is a chance to lose temperature, chain of custody, or the shipment itself. Suppose each handling step succeeds 99 percent of the time. A route with 5 handovers delivers intact 95 percent of the time. A route with 8 delivers 92 percent. Push each step to 99.9 percent and the 8 step route delivers 99.2 percent. The arithmetic says 2 things. The number of handovers is a first order lever, which is why the news of the week is about networks that keep the box inside 1 operator. And once the count is small, the quality of each step matters more than the count, which is why the handling specification matters more than the routing.
For a forwarder, that is an unfamiliar objective. The routing engine that finds the cheapest compliant path is solving the wrong problem. The path with 1 fewer handover at 15 percent higher cost is the better answer for a sample and the wrong answer for a pallet of over the counter medicine, and a system that cannot tell the 2 apart will get 1 of them wrong every day.
Service level is the decision variable
Price is set by the market. Service level is set by the design of the route: which lanes, which handlers, how many stops, what temperature control at each point, what monitoring, what recourse when a flight is canceled. For irreplaceable freight, the shipper is not choosing a price point. They are choosing a loss probability, and the price follows from it.
That changes what a quote should contain. A quote for a sample that states a rate and a transit time has left out the number the customer is actually buying. A quote that states the expected loss probability, built from the handover count and the measured reliability of each step on the route, is a quote for the right product. The operators that can produce that number, because they measure the reliability of each step rather than assume it, will hold this freight. The ones that quote it like a parcel will lose it the first time something thaws.
The sample is irreplaceable. The objective function has to say so.