UPS Offers New Shipping Options for Healthcare Customers

Atlanta, June 02, 2008

UPS (NYSE:UPS) today announced a significant expansion of its capabilities for handling and managing the shipment of temperature-sensitive medical items, including around-the-clock intervention when necessary to utilize refrigeration or replenish dry ice.

The new suite of time- and temperature-sensitive capabilities has been developed for the pharmaceutical, biotech and medical device industries. Targeted particularly to global clinical trials, UPS is facilitating the quick movement of test medicines, specimens, supplies, testing kits and accompanying documents to locations worldwide along with convenient UPS Returns® processing options for international shipments.

"In order to find an edge in a competitive industry, healthcare companies are searching for better ways to enhance compliance and reduce cost when they manage and ship their sensitive inventories," said Bill Hook, vice president, global strategy, UPS Healthcare Logistics. "UPS is committed to helping companies by investing in unique solutions, because healthcare is an important and growing market for us."

The latest answer to the industry's unique needs involves UPS Proactive ResponseSM, which provides a powerful monitoring engine for proactive, around-the-clock attention to help ensure product integrity. The contract service, available in 72 countries, includes dry ice replenishment or refrigeration at select air gateway facilities and intervention in the event of unexpected delays.

The Proactive Response service can automatically compare data on where a package is against where it should be and direct pre-arranged actions to avoid problems or speed recovery. These integrated processes, particularly when applied to healthcare, take advantage of recently simplified UPS dry ice standards that meet IATA or 49CFR requirements.

"Biopharma companies tell us that temperature mapping is an increasingly critical component of their supply chain planning," said Hook. "We've studied our environment inside UPS aircraft during flight, within the humidity chamber at our UPS Package Lab and during ground transit to create a solution for reliable, predictable transit and seamless reaction when an exception occurs."

In a related development, UPS Supply Chain Solutions broke ground last week on a new 215,000-square-foot healthcare distribution facility in Roermond, The Netherlands, that will open in the spring of 2009. It will provide healthcare customers with compliance tools and customized inventory management along with temperature-sensitive storage and quality assurance services to link with UPS's European and global freight and express package networks. The expansion will add a fourth building to an existing UPS Supply Chain Solutions European logistics campus that totals nearly 1 million square feet.