Healthcare Supply

Canadian Alliance fortifies the healthcare supply chain for suppliers and end users across Canada. Recognizing the necessity of sensitivity in healthcare, Canadian Alliance is pleased to offer a variety of purpose-built health and safety logistics services to move products with speed, accuracy, and care. From cross docking to last mile delivery, we understand the importance of the timely flow of supplies. Our services include:

• Healthcare Supply Chain Consulting
• Food-Grade Shipping & Handling Environment
• Hazmat Shipping, Handling & Warehousing
• EDI Interface to Customers’ Systems
• Medical Equipment Storage Protocols
• Strong History of Safe PPE Storage

Canadian Alliance is pleased to partner with many manufacturers of healthcare supplies. These products are critical to the functioning of hospitals and clinics in their daily provision of services and our team ensures these goods reach their destination as planned. For everything from personal protective equipment to disposable patient care supplies, Canadian Alliance has solutions for every logistics plan. We offer services including:

• Inbound & Outbound Transportation Management
• Healthcare Supplies and Safety Supplies Transportation
• Order Management, Kitting or Light Assembly
• Pallet Management
• Healthcare Customer Delivery
• Warehousing and Distribution

Healthcare Logistics Management 

The healthcare supply chain is unlike any other. Managing medical logistics requires more sensitivity, more accuracy, and more accountability than even food supply chains. Medical and safety supplies—even those that are non-regulated—are integral to the ways Canadians receive medical care and protect themselves every single day. Accordingly, Canadian Alliance takes healthcare supply chain management very seriously and is pleased to offer purpose-built, full service logistics solutions. With high quality standards and  technology in hand, Canadian Alliance is able to offer unparalleled healthcare supply chain management consultation and solutions to manufacturers all over the world. 

A successful medical logistics supply chain strategy is contingent upon three necessary tenets. 

• On time, 
• Resilient
• Safe.

 When any of those three tenets falter or fail, the supply chain breaks down. Canadian Alliance offers services tailored to these requirements, making sure that end users get what they need, when they need it. 

Canadian Alliance recognizes that predictability is of critical importance in the healthcare supply chain. For decades, the supply chain has lacked the ability to create and maintain lines of constant open communication with third party logistics service providers, fabricators, and end users alike. This made planning for possible equipment or medical goods shortages much more difficult. Today, new technologies have created additional possibilities for this sort of communication, which helps fabricators forecast demand, healthcare supply chain service providers create robust logistics plans, and customers plan for usage. This technology, called Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), lets Canadian Alliance interface directly with customers’ systems, opening a channel for logistical data exchange that improves the consistency of the healthcare supply transport.

Surging demand for healthcare supplies is a challenge for any supplier and, whether you’re looking for last mile delivery of disposable patient care or to transport ventilators, Canadian Alliance can help build resilience into your supply chain to prevent gaps in supply or delays. Canadian Alliance also ensures the safety of healthcare supply cargo through a series of supply chain interventions. These interventions include food-grade shipping and handling, and sensitivity to turnaround times, ensuring product is never contaminated and moves quickly to its final destination. These strategies allow Canadian Alliance to offer fast, resilient, safe supply chain solutions to healthcare suppliers. 

Healthcare Logistics Challenges

The COVID-19 pandemic changed how we think about medical supply chains. Managing the steady production, transport, and distribution of medical supplies has always been an issue of grave importance. Early in the pandemic, incredible demand surges for everything from disposable supplies to ventilators put extreme stress on the healthcare supply chain. Then, incredibly challenging logistical problems had to be overcome in order to produce and distribute vaccines. Today, the global healthcare supply chain has largely overcome these trials but a new and lasting challenge still lies ahead: supply chain congestion.

“Port congestion has become a serious problem in recent years,” says Alicia Xu, Transportation Manager at Canadian Alliance. “In Vancouver, boats might wait an extra two weeks to be serviced in port. This poses a serious challenge for the healthcare supply chain.” 

Healthcare supplies often receive priority in port, but the supply chain is still seeing delays and these backlogs have a ripple effect impacting the medical industry far beyond the treatment of COVID-19. Further, safety equipment suppliers, warehouse PPE suppliers, PPE equipment suppliers, and safety clothing suppliers for other sectors are also at risk of delay or inventory shortages. To mitigate these medical supply chain risks, Canadian Alliance works with suppliers to carefully plot optimal logistics based on up to date forecast data. For many suppliers, this means shipping less but more often and co-packing; for others, this means opting to cross dock to make up for time spent in port. 

Vertical Efficiency Benefits

Logistics in healthcare are demanding and for good reason. But Canadian Alliance is committed to being true logistics partners, working closely with our customers to develop unique supply chain management systems. We’re pleased to offer special rates and parameters for customers that meet our efficiency criteria. 

Our team has created a uniquely high-density warehousing system, and if your business has applicable attributes and needs, you are well positioned to take advantage of the cost efficiencies created. These order attributes include a minimum of 300 pallet positions, with 4-6 annual inventory turns, and standardized pallet stacks with heights of not exceeding  58”. Collaborating with customers that meet this criteria enables Canadian Alliance to optimize our medical supplies logistical plans to move product quickly, safely, and at a competitive cost. 

These efficiencies allow for the consolidation of various aspects of the medical supply chain, benefitting our customers and safety equipment suppliers alike. Our role as a third party health logistics service provider is to support medical supply organizers and producers; this sort of collaboration allows us to create efficiencies that are otherwise impossible. 

Canadian Alliance specializes in creating completely customized supply chain plans to ensure healthcare products reach their destination on time and intact, even when faced with systemic challenges. Between the COVID-19 pandemic and its lasting implications within the healthcare system and Canada’s aging population, it’s more important than ever to keep supplies moving, even in times of struggle. As a third party healthcare logistics service provider, Canadian Alliance is uniquely positioned to help develop and fortify the health care supply chain for the future.