The 19th of August was a milestone in BRU Cargo when the kick-off came for their pharma certification program which was certified also by IATA and will serve as an IATA pilot project. By offering global standards for pharma shipments BRU Cargo has taken the pole position in this particular biz field.
Earlier this year, Brussels Airport invited the BRU air cargo community to take part in an effort to upgrade, align and standardize the pharma handling processes along with training industry
stakeholders throughout the complete pharma supply chain in and around the airport.
On top of this the airport entered into a partnership with IATA with the purpose to fill the void by offering a global industry certification standard. The framework of this will be the IATA
“center of Excellence for Independent Validators in Pharmaceutical Handling programs” - or in short – “CEIV Pharma.”
The secret to the process of shipping pharmaceuticals is to keep each and every shipment within the defined temperature parameters.
There have been a lot of different regional regulations in the past for shippers, handlers and airlines to cope with.
Up till now, there has been no real global certification standard.
This now seems to be a thing of the past
Brussels Airport is the first airport that will be certified by IATA and is at the same time a pilot project for IATA with the aim of quickly spreading this to other airports worldwide.
The kick-off program entailed cooperation from eleven participating companies, overlooked by the IATA project team.
The participants in the “cool chain” process involved on the airport were Brussels Airlines Cargo, Finnair Cargo, Aviapartner, Swissport, WFS (on the handling side), AD Handling, BPL, Expeditors,
UTI, DDV from the forwarding side and trucker Jan de Rijk.
Steven Polmans, Head of Cargo at Brussels Airport is rightly proud of this development and states that “Brussels Airport is aiming to strengthen its position as a leading gateway for the handling
and transportation of pharmaceutical freight in Europe.”
He goes on to say that “we hope that our leadership in being recognized as a CEIV Pharma certified community will persuade other airports to do the same.“
It’s interesting to note how various regulatory bodies, when approached in the correct manner, can be brought into the picture.
In this case, the Belgian regulator (FAGG) and Belgian Customs along with the pharma shipping community has been invited to be actively involved in designing and setting up this project.
Nathan De Valck who is the resident pharma and life science logistics expert in charge for pharma and perishables at BRU, says, “the wide range and diversity of the participants shows the broad
interest of the pharma logistics community based at BRU Cargo and their commitment to take the pharma handling to a next level.”
Pharmaceuticals are marching on.
Our recent articles on this subject will be followed by more as we continue to monitor this truly explosive market segment.
John Mc Donagh
See also "Brussels Airport is Certifying the Pharma Logistics Chain"
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