Descartes Systems Group announced that Canadian Blood Services, a national not-for-profit charitable organization that manages the blood supply in all Canadian provinces and territories except Quebec, has implemented Descartes’ cloud-based transportation management solution to help manage inventories in transit and the delivery of blood and blood products to hospitals, clinics, labs and other facilities.
“Our mission is to manage the blood and blood products supply in a manner that gains the trust, commitment and confidence of all Canadians by providing a safe, secure, cost-effective and accessible supply of quality blood and related products,” says Jean Landreville, distribution manager at Canadian Blood Services. “Descartes is helping us deliver on this mission with a comprehensive solution that provides robust logistics management and chain of custody-tracking capabilities that are critical to our operations.”
Descartes’ transportation management solution is designed to provide modular end-to-end multimodal functionality that spans the entire shipment lifecycle. Orders are taken directly from Canadian Blood Services’ enterprise resource planning system and are optimized based on business requirements, service criteria and cost. The solution is designed to determine whether the time-sensitive shipment should be transported on Canadian Blood Services’ private fleet or via a third-party carrier.
Shipments transported on Canadian Blood Services’ private fleet are optimized to reduce fuel and operational costs while meeting defined service levels. To help ensure chain of custody compliance, the shipments are scanned on and off the vehicles, and then shipment location and handling information is tracked, including electronic proof-of-delivery signature capture. For shipments transported via a third-party carrier, the shipment management process is enhanced with optimized carrier selection, integrated carrier-compliant parcel labeling and performance management reporting.
“We are really proud to be working with Canadian Blood Services and pleased that our solutions are helping to make a difference in Canada,” says Arthur Mesher, chairman and chief executive officer at Descartes. “Our ability to rapidly deploy and cost-effectively combine purchased transportation and private fleet management with leading-edge mobile applications is a perfect fit for organizations like Canadian Blood Services.”
