Right Sizing Their Shipments
Siemens Healthineers is a leading MedTech company with over 125 years of experience. Their portfolio spans in-vitro and in-vivo diagnostics to imageguided therapy and innovative cancer care, and the equipment and services they provide are crucial for clinical decision-making and treatment pathways.
The company’s American Distribution Center (ADC) located in Plainfield, IN, is responsible for distributing the reagents, assays, and parts used to support the delivery of MedTech equipment to customers. They have three cooler sizes for their dry ice frozen shipments to domestic U.S. customers and have historically used only the middle-sized cooler for all shipments. They needed to make sure they were using the best cooler size for each shipment.
A Cooler Solution
The team at Siemens was hoping to decrease packaging size by using smaller coolers without increasing the quantity of coolers required to fulfill an order. They made the decision to go with MagicLogic’s Cube-IQ and BlackBox solutions. BlackBox gave them the ability to run multiple simulations with different conditions so they could determine the best cooler size for each shipment and predict the stock needed for both sizes of coolers.
“Having BlackBox has been extremely useful as a quick and effective way to check an idea,” said Kelsee Todd, industrial engineer at Siemens Healthineers. “We didn’t initially know how many orders would fit in the smaller cooler, and within a day, we were able to get exact numbers by using historical shipment data.”
MagicLogic has given Siemens a way to run large amounts of data through a simulation to make data-based decisions, empowering the engineering team to quickly and fully vet and pitch new ideas and concepts that would otherwise not be possible. Because the BlackBox output is customizable, they can edit the output for each project to fit their changing needs.
Unfreeze Their Assets
The simulations proved that 96% of the company’s domestic U.S. dry ice shipments could ship in the smallest size cooler, reducing waste and cost for the majority of U.S. shipments. They predict a 5,240 kg reduction of expanded polystyrene (EPS) per year.
These adjustments not only save Siemens Healthineers money by reducing parcel size, but they also represent a significant sustainability win. Additionally, the use of smaller coolers frees up valuable warehouse space, as less room is needed for storage. Customers also benefit, as smaller coolers are easier to receive and dispose of, enhancing the overall customer experience.
“We’re excited to have a resource that allows us to ‘gut check’ different ideas and add importance to projects,” said Todd. “Moving forward, we have projects planned to investigate the coolers used for the export of dry ice shipments.”
