Director of Cold Chain — Interim, Temperature-Controlled Logistics

The mandate

Three vaccine consignments experienced temperature excursions on nominally qualified lanes, and a customer audit found gaps between logger alarms and intervention records. The director was dismissed for certifying readiness without representative summer evidence.

The interim must arrive within two weeks for a ten-month assignment covering investigation, seasonal requalification and customer recertification. An internal quality-operations leader will inherit the network after two independently observed operating cycles.

Handover requires excursion incidence below 0.15 per cent for sixteen weeks, every high-risk lane qualified across seasonal profiles, alarm response inside fifteen minutes, and the successor completing one simulated and one live exception command cycle.

The director may suspend lanes, change packaging profiles and approve validated alternate routes below ₹50 lakh. New cold-store capital above ₹2 crore and customer compensation above ₹75 lakh need executive approval; product disposition remains the shipper's Quality decision.

Ambient transport, vaccine demand forecasting and commercial tender pricing are excluded. The assignment focuses on custody, qualification and intervention from accepted pickup to controlled delivery.

Why this seat is open

The audit showed that paperwork qualification did not reflect the network's hottest operating conditions. Customer trust will not return through a new dashboard alone. A finite cold-chain operator must prove the physical system and then transfer command to an internal leader.

What you will own

• Reconstruct each excursion across packaging, handling, lane dwell, logger, alarm and intervention evidence.
• Decide which lanes suspend, requalify or operate under temporary enhanced monitoring.
• Approve representative seasonal qualification protocols for packaging and route combinations.
• Establish fifteen-minute alarm command with named authority for intercept, replenish, divert or hold.
• Audit cold-store mapping, calibration, backup power and door-control evidence at priority nodes.
• Rebuild customer assurance packs from actual qualification and event data rather than certification summaries.
• Qualify the successor through one unannounced simulation and one live temperature exception.

Candidate qualifications

• Eighteen-plus years in pharmaceutical or life-sciences cold chain with national network leadership.
• Managed material temperature excursions and customer or regulator scrutiny across vaccine or biologic shipments.
• Expert knowledge of GDP, packaging qualification, thermal mapping, lane validation and calibrated monitoring.
• Experience designing intervention command that works across carriers, airlines, cold stores and customer Quality teams.
• Ability to preserve custody and evidence while product-disposition authority remains with the shipper.
• Record of achieving low excursion rates through physical controls rather than exclusions or altered definitions.

Non-negotiables

• Onsite in Chennai within two weeks and available for out-of-hours alarm escalation.
• No interest in packaging, logger, carrier or cold-store vendors under review.
• Will suspend a lane when qualification evidence is not representative.
• Available for the full ten-month seasonal proof and successor qualification.

1. 49 words maximum. State your earliest Chennai start and willingness to join the temperature-alarm rota.
2. 49 words maximum. Which vaccine or biologic excursion did you investigate, and what physical cause was confirmed?
3. 49 words maximum. What evidence made a lane qualification genuinely representative of peak summer conditions?