PHARMANIAGA Bhd is exploring the use of unmanned aerial vehicles or drones for pharmaceutical-grade medical delivery to enhance its logistics capabilities while making healthcare services more accessible to remote and geographically challenging areas.
Through this initiative, Pharmaniaga aims to dramatically reduce delivery time and cost as well as increase supply chain efficiencies given drone delivery is estimated to be five times more efficient than conventional delivery methods that require boats and off-road vehicles to deliver medicines to remotely located Government hospitals and clinics.
The first phase of the project’s proof of concept (POC) – code-named Project Eagle – has successfully taken place recently in Pulau Pangkor, Perak involving a distance of 4.2km from a jetty in Manjung to Klinik Kesihatan Pangkor with about 3kg of medicines delivered for emergency medical treatment.
Led by a female pilot, the POC was the first longest-distance drone medical delivery of pharmaceutical products over water in Malaysia.
“A normal mode of delivery using a ferry from the jetty in Manjung to the clinic at Pulau Pangkor will take approximately 30 minutes as opposed to only 3.5 minutes when using the drone as demonstrated,” commented Pharmaniaga’s group managing director Datuk Zulkarnain Md Eusope.
“Despite the unfavourable weather as it was drizzling with poor visibility due to 100% cloud cover, Project Eagle in Pulau Pangkor was carried out successfully.”
According to Zulkarnain, Pharmaniaga’s drone technology is advanced in terms of performance and cost-effectiveness compared to traditional logistics, especially when delivering products to geographically-challenging locations.
“The use of drones has high potential to be applied for emergency and rapid response geographically challenging,” he observed.
“Even in narrow and limited landing space, it was a precision landing for the Project Eagle drones using QR Code. This is truly a leading-edge and new era of transporting medicines.”
Project Eagle will continue with several more stages at different locations and terrains, including the remote areas in Sabah and Sarawak. Findings from the project will be documented and submitted to the relevant ministries and government agencies.
Since last year, the Government has adopted drone technology as a delivery method for medical products such as blood samples and microbiological specimens.
Other than that, it is used in agricultural industries for pesticide spraying despite its limitation in effectiveness for weather conditions such as unpredictable speed and direction of winds.
The usage of drone’s technology in large scale misting of areas with disinfectants – especially outdoor places – is recently used by a few countries to battle COVID-19.
Malaysia is poised to be the frontrunner in the drone technology industry which is expected to generate US$127 bil (RM517 bil) by 2025. The global market size specific to drone package delivery was US$642.4 mil in 2019 and is projected to reach US$7.4 bil in 2027.
At the close of today’s mid-day trading, Pharmaniaga was unchanged at 80.5 sen with 1.46 million shares traded, thus valuing the company at RM1.05 bil. – Nov 8, 2021
