Polyfoam - Products

Market: Pharmaceuticals

Temperature-Sensitive Medications – On-Line Pharmacy

Customer: Merck-Medco

In the 1990’s, on-line ordering of medications became extremely popular. The nation’s leading ecommerce pharmacy, Merck-Medco, had realized great success with internet orders. All of their purchasing, however, was decentralized, and was being done autonomously at each of their many distribution centers. The end result of that was different shipping methods for the same medications, and lost economies of scale due to smaller volume purchases.

Central purchasing at Merck-Medco corporate realized the inefficiency of this, and enlisted Polyfoam to analyze their shipping methods and make recommendations for cost-reductions. Polyfoam’s team initially discovered several areas of savings:

  1. Consolidating container sizes to ship the same number of medications with fewer SKUs;
  2. Uniform shipping methods across all distribution centers;
  3. Centralized purchasing for economies of scale in purchasing.

Convincing the individual centers to make changes was no small task, and central purchasing once again enlisted Polyfoam’s help. Through expertise in controlled shipments, perseverance, and partnering with corporate, they were able to switch the locations over to the same system purchased through corporate, and immediately realized tremendous savings.