From the December 2014 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine


“Most of this product comes in from Europe. It gets loaded on a UPS brown tail plane in Germany, and it gets unloaded in Louisville. Those containers get loaded on a trailer, brought over here, we unload them in this building on a ball deck, and we open up the containers for the first time. From there,” says McKenna, “we put the pallets into the cooler and then stop the temp tale.”

The temp tale is what tracks that temperature through the entire process. The UPS employees record those temp tales and give them to the customer’s quality assurance department. The QA department must then approve the temperatures before the product can continue on its way to being distributed. The flu vaccines are stored at two to eight degrees (Celsius). During transportation, gel packs keep the inventory within that range.


“The packaging does a lot of the work,” says McKenna. For some products, there are -80 degree freezers which can only be opened three times a day for two minutes at a time. In some instances, UPS will custom build a freezer for the specific needs of a customer. In the building we toured they also had 20 degree freezers, a hazmat room, and an in-house pharmacy. The pharmacy is operated by a third-party and can take prescription orders, fill them, and ship them directly to the customer.

A new shipping option from UPS, called Temperature True Cryo, allows for transporting products at negative 150 degrees Celsius by using liquid nitrogen stored in dry vapor form. The container will retain that temperature for up to ten days while the product is making its way to its destination.

High level security
At UPS LTLC there is no mistaking that you’re within a highly secure facility. There are enormous vault-like rooms which only a select few people are ever allowed into. There are processes and procedures A new shipping option from UPS, called Temperature True Cryo, allows for transporting products at negative 150 degrees Celsius by using liquid nitrogen stored in dry vapor form.

To secure cargo in ground transport, UPS was instrumental in getting legislation passed in Kentucky that drew distinctions between regular auto thefts and stealing a trailer that might have millions of dollars worth of cargo in it. They also do not drive around in trucks that specify their contents, for example no trucks say UPS Healthcare. By remaining anonymous it becomes more difficult for a potential criminal to gauge the value of the truck’s contents.

For air traffic they monitor global politics. “It’s all information that feeds into our control towers,” says van Peteghem, “We catalogue political unrest and keep that information available to our operators to determine where trouble spots are.” But examining world politics informs UPS in more ways than just security.

December 2014 Magazine

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