Marken commissions cold-chain distribution hub for Irish clients
The new facility - currently in its final commissioning stages - will be adjacent to Dublin airport, and is designed to offer the distribution of clinical trial supplies within all temperature ranges for manufacturing and packaging clients in Ireland.
“The current market trends ask for a high flexibility of packaging to be offered as well active and passive solutions,” Senior VP of Marken’s Commercial operations, Ariette Van Strien, told Outsourcing-Pharma.com.
“The facility in Ireland will help us to better serve our customers with the best packaging solution and condition them close to the client’s hubs in order to be able to turn around any request in the shortest time possible,” she added.
Van Strien attributed the new facility’s location to the fact a number of Marken’s major pharma clients have manufacturing plants in Ireland. “The set-up of a cold chain hub made sense to serve them better and offer greater flexibility.”
Ireland has for a number of years been a hub for pharma manufacturing, and though there have been some concerns as patent expirations and global competition have shuttered a number of facilities, any decline has been offset by a move into large molecule and biomanufacturing.
Head in the Cloud
The facility will include space for a large 15 to 25C controlled room temperature area, a 2 to 8C walk in refrigerator, and a -20C walk in freezer, the company has said, and - as with Marken’s other sites - will use the firm’s Maestro booking and tracking system.
The cloud-based system, said Van Strien, has real-time access and allows clients to see what the firm sees, “offering full transparency.”
She continued: “It is, as well, a data repository and allows our clients and ourselves to store all documents specific to a shipment in the system which makes the communication straight forward and seamless. This can be very useful if - in case of an audit - data needs to be accessed to prove the supply chain integrity.”
