CUSTOMER STORIES
February 5, 2024
x min read
“When using Tive, Optimize has never lost a shipment, temperature excursions have gone all but extinct, and we have been able to ensure that life-saving treatments, disease-eradicating research, and life-giving organs safely arrive at the correct temperature — and are viable for patient use.”
- Jon Antonucci
Director of Revenue, Optimize Courier
With more than four decades of experience, Optimize Courier is dedicated to the worldwide coordination and transportation of time-critical, expedited, and temperature-sensitive logistics. Optimize faces the most important—and the most daunting—shipments with confidence, easily handling segments of the supply chain that face the most extraordinary challenges.
Because customers come to Optimize to gain a white-glove shipping experience from start to finish, the company wanted to be able to provide value-added, real-time location and temperature tracking. In 2020, Optimize conducted a successful trial using Tive Solo 5G Non-Lithium trackers, and quickly began adding Tive to all their high-value shipments.
“Now we use Tive trackers on 97% of our shipments.”
When a client chooses Optimize, that shipment is managed by Optimize every step of the way. A dedicated driver comes to a location to pick up your shipment. They drive that shipment to the airport, tender it to the airline, and the airline flies it to the destination airport—where Optimize has another dedicated driver waiting to deliver it to the client’s recipient. Your shipment is never outside of Optimize’s hands.
Prior to Tive, Optimize lacked active GPS and temperature tracking; their only monitoring capacity was passive logging. After a shipment was completed, they plugged the old-school temperature data logger into the computer and viewed a record of what had already happened during the delivery—which prevented proactive engagement.
According to Antonucci, “The logger data would show that there had been a temperature spike 30 minutes before the flight took off. And we would know that someone had left that shipment out on the tarmac for 30 minutes, and yep, it was Nashville in August. Things needed to change.” Now Optimize customers know that their critical shipments are always safe.
Optimize Courier wanted their customers to have the power of visibility into their own shipments—all the way down to the street level.
With Tive, customers now know exactly when and where shipments will arrive, and in what condition.
This high level of accountability yields huge benefits for Optimize, including better collaboration at all stages of delivery and improved customer satisfaction—helping demonstrate reliability and ensure repeat business.
Tive helps Optimize actively monitor each temperature-controlled shipment—every step of the way. Not only does the easy-to-use Tive cloud platform track the movement of clients’ shipments en route to delivery, the platform also sends notifications to the Optimize operations team whenever a shipment is at risk of deviating from configured temperature, shock, and light range limits. The Optimize team is empowered to immediately investigate the issue—stopping the problem in its tracks.
In every business, customer happiness is king. “Because we can see where every shipment is, Tive helps us find lost and misplaced shipments.”
In mid-2023, an airline told Optimize that a package was missing. Optimize was able to tell them exactly what building it was in on their premises. Said Antonucci, “It was basically the equivalent of ‘Can you go check in building 31? We’re pretty sure it’s over in the right-hand corner.’ And it was.”
For Antonucci, the importance of Tive all comes down to this: “How much value do you think your clients would find in being able to know everything about their shipment?” For Optimize clients, that value is tremendous. Tive has proven to be extremely critical to Antonucci and his team.
Being confident in knowing how your shipment was treated—at every step in the journey—is huge. “If there is value in your shipment, there is value in using Tive.”
“Perhaps you ship artwork. Would your clients like to know that their artwork—their $250,000 painting—was not subjected to undo amounts of humidity or light? Or you’re in electronics. Wouldn’t you want to know if your computers just got dropped?”
Delivering on their promise of being a concierge courier—and providing true white-glove treatment—is of the utmost importance to Optimize. So whether ensuring that live animals are being transported safely and humanely or monitoring a temperature-sensitive shipment that needs to be kept at -150°C, knowing where that shipment is—and that shipment conditions have been perfectly maintained—is critical.
The shipments handled by Optimize often have years of research behind them and cost hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars—and with Tive, Optimize clients can rest easy knowing they can see their shipments in real-time. “We were expecting great things from Tive, and we’ve gotten great things. Tive has completely exceeded our expectations,” said Antonucci.
Tive even changed the way Optimize conducts business. “Tive has changed our business so much that if the service was no longer available we would have to try and find a replacement quickly—because we can’t go back to NOT having the functionality Tive provides.
“There are other shipment visibility solutions that companies pretend give live updates. But it’s not live— not the way you think it is. Tive gives us the visibility data we need to save shipments and effectively serve our clients. Even better, we are able to ensure that life-giving materials are always kept safe.”
This shipment needed to stay within an ambient (+15-25°C) temperature range and was shipping from Durham, NC to Memphis, TN. The planned route was using a passenger airline and their temperature-controlled service, which also included a connection in Charlotte, NC.
When the shipment arrived in Charlotte, NC, Tive sent an alert to Optimize indicating that the temperature of the package had rapidly dropped down to +17°C. Optimize immediately contacted the airline—and found out that the shipment had mistakenly been put into a refrigerated cooler (+2-8°C). The airline immediately removed the shipment from the cooler and placed it into proper ambient (+15-25°C) conditions.
Optimize then arranged to recover the shipment in Charlotte and use a temperature-controlled vehicle to safely drive the shipment the rest of the way to Memphis. This real-time notification prevented Optimize from losing $500,000 worth of goods—and enabled the shipment to be delivered on time and in full.
