How Marken Manages a Global Cold-Chain Asset Network Using Asset Panda on AWS

About Marken

Marken, a UPS Healthcare company, is a global leader in clinical and pharmaceutical supply-chain logistics, specializing in the temperature-controlled "cold chain" transport of highly sensitive biological materials, including clinical trial kits, patient samples, and cell and gene therapies. Central to that mission is a large, reusable fleet of specialized temperature-controlled shipping containers, such as Credo shippers and liquid-nitrogen "dry" shippers, that circulate continuously through a worldwide network of roughly 300 to 400 operating sites.

Marken's Global Packaging Asset and Network Management team, working across the UK, India, and the Americas, is responsible for keeping that fleet visible, conditioned, and available. Because these assets carry life-critical materials and must be tracked and returned reliably across the globe, precise control over the network is core to how the business runs.

The Challenge

Managing a fleet of high-value, reusable cold-chain assets that move continuously across hundreds of global sites is a demanding control problem. Marken needed real-time visibility into where every asset was, what state it was in (available, in transit, conditioning, or in repair), and its full transaction history, and needed that information to flow into the wider enterprise, its Maestro transport-management system and its Power BI analytics and data lake, rather than sitting in a silo.

Manual and spreadsheet-based tracking could not close accountability gaps or support the operational KPIs the business depends on, including asset utilization, cycle time, loss rate, and inventory accuracy. As adoption expanded across Marken's global network, the sheer volume of data, high-frequency arrival and departure scans, and dozens of distinct workflows began to strain performance, while reporting could not easily aggregate transaction history across many assets, sites, and time periods.

Answering time-sensitive questions, such as proving an item's country of origin for tariff compliance or reconciling scanned inventory against expected counts, was slow and often returned incomplete data. At the same time, core logistics processes, warehouse receiving, procurement request forms, and demand planning still lived in spreadsheets and needed to be brought into a single system.

For a company moving life-critical clinical materials, the stakes of getting it wrong are high. An unaccounted-for or delayed shipper is not merely a capital loss; it can jeopardize a clinical trial shipment or a patient's therapy.

Without accurate, real-time, integrated asset data, Marken risked shipment delays, working capital tied up in over-provisioning containers to cover blind spots, audit exposure, and an inability to answer urgent compliance questions, all while trying to grow adoption among field teams who needed a system fast and simple enough to trust.

Partner Solution

Asset Panda serves as Marken's global system of record for its reusable asset fleet, modeling every container as a tracked asset with configurable fields, statuses, and complete transaction history, so staff at any site can see what they have and its condition at a glance. Barcode and QR scanning capture arrival and departure events at each node in the network, turning the physical movement of assets into structured, reportable data.

Because compliance-grade tracking is essential in cold-chain logistics, Asset Panda worked with Marken and its RFID partner to integrate RFID scan data into the platform through the Asset Panda API, enabling automated, high-volume capture of asset movements beyond what manual scanning alone could achieve. This gave Marken a digital tracking layer suited to the regulatory and chain-of-custody demands of clinical logistics.

Recognizing that Marken operates an interconnected ecosystem rather than standalone tools, Asset Panda is integrating with Marken's Maestro transport-management system via API, so that a single "depart" scan updates both systems instead of requiring staff at each site to enter the same transaction twice. The roadmap extends to direct Power BI and data-lake connectivity, along with SFTP, webhooks, and open API access, so asset data can feed Marken's enterprise analytics as a live source rather than a static export.

To solve performance-at-scale and unlock advanced reporting, Asset Panda is migrating Marken to Asset Panda Pro, its next-generation platform. Pro delivers:

• Dramatically faster imports and inline editing, a dedicated reporting tool, and saved views for the aggregate transaction analysis Marken's KPIs require
• Configurable dashboards and widgets for status and location views
• Automations that replace manual steps, for example automatically advancing a container from a "conditioning" status to "available" after a set period, or auto-generating and routing work orders

It also adds matrix (multi-item) barcode scanning, an offline-capable mobile app whose interface mirrors the web, multi-tenant "modules" so different departments can run their own workflows under one umbrella, kitting for grouped assets, and the Ursa AI assistant.

On top of the Classic to Pro migration, Asset Panda is helping Marken build new capabilities the business has long needed, including warehouse receiving, digitized procurement request and purchase-order processes, and demand planning, directly inside the platform.

The Asset Panda platform, including Asset Panda Pro, is delivered as a fully managed, cloud-native SaaS application running on Amazon Web Services in the US East (N. Virginia) Region, giving Marken one global system reachable from every operating site with no infrastructure to run itself. The primary AWS services underpinning the solution are: Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), which runs Asset Panda’s containerized web, API, background-processing, and scheduled-job workloads and absorbs the high-frequency scan, import, and API traffic generated by hundreds of sites and the automated RFID feed; Amazon RDS for MySQL, the managed relational database that stores asset records, complete transaction histories, and workflow configurations across a primary writer and read replicas, keeping high-volume reads and aggregate transaction reporting responsive; Amazon ElastiCache for Redis, which backs application caching and the queued background jobs that process bulk imports and the recurring integration syncs exchanging data with systems such as Maestro; Amazon S3, which provides durable object storage for attachments and documents such as purchase orders, along with generated reports and data exports, with downloads delivered through time-limited pre-signed URLs and scheduled report files also deliverable over SFTP to downstream systems; Amazon OpenSearch Service, which indexes platform API activity so integration traffic and data changes can be searched and audited, supporting the chain-of-custody expectations of clinical logistics; and Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR) with AWS CodeBuild, which form the automated container build-and-release pipeline Asset Panda uses to deliver platform updates without downtime.

As a managed service provider, Asset Panda has supported Marken across the full lifecycle for years. During pre-migration and implementation, a dedicated client director and hands-on implementation specialists scope requirements, build and clean up the account, run data migration, and stand up a sandbox trial environment so Marken can validate that every workflow and report meets its requirements before going live, with the platform's development and API specialists brought in for technical integration work.

During and after the transition, Asset Panda keeps the existing "Classic" environment fully running in parallel with no downtime until Marken confirms Pro does everything the prior system did, and coordinates progress through recurring working sessions, a shared project plan, mass and one-on-one training, and 24/7 support. This white-glove, jointly managed model is why Marken has moved from asking "is this the right system?" to treating Asset Panda as an accepted, embedded part of its operational ecosystem.

The Results

Asset Panda has become the accepted, embedded system of record for Marken's global cold-chain fleet, giving the company a single source of truth across a network of hundreds of sites where none existed before.

RFID and barcode scanning turned the physical movement of containers into structured, auditable data, closing long-standing accountability gaps and improving inventory accuracy, while API integration with the Maestro transport system means a single departure scan now updates both platforms, eliminating the duplicate manual entry that field teams previously performed at every site. Marken estimates these changes have reduced unaccounted-for assets across the network by roughly 20 to 30%, directly protecting both capital and clinical shipments.

The move to Asset Panda Pro compounds the gains. Bulk data imports that once had to be broken into small batches and could take hours now process hundreds of thousands of records in about 12 minutes, and the faster, more responsive interface removes the latency that had slowed field adoption, helping Marken bring more of its global sites onto the system with confidence. Aggregate transaction reports that previously took up to a week to produce, and often returned with missing fields, are now available on demand, so the team can answer compliance and inventory questions in minutes rather than days.

Just as importantly, automations and dashboards replace manual status changes and spreadsheet tracking with self-updating workflows and live KPI views, freeing staff hours for higher-value work and giving leaders real-time insight into utilization, cycle time, loss rate, and inventory accuracy.

By tightening cycle time and reducing loss, Marken can run its network with fewer spare containers, freeing working capital, and by feeding clean asset data into Power BI and its data lake, the company is extending Asset Panda from a tracking tool into a forecasting and analytics backbone for its cold-chain operation.

About the Partner

Asset Panda, founded in 2012 and headquartered in Dallas, Texas, is an asset tracking, inspection, and audit platform used by organizations across financial services, government, education, healthcare, and enterprise IT in more than 140 industries to manage the full lifecycle of their physical and digital assets. Delivered as a cloud-based SaaS application on AWS with native mobile apps, the platform lets customers model any trackable item with custom fields, workflows, granular permissions, barcode and RFID scanning, and an open API with a broad catalog of integrations, and, in Asset Panda Pro, adds automations, multi-tenant modules, offline mobile scanning, kitting, advanced reporting, and the Ursa AI assistant.

Asset Panda is an AWS Partner whose platform is built and operated entirely on AWS, running its production workloads on Amazon EKS with Amazon RDS, Amazon S3, Amazon ElastiCache, and Amazon OpenSearch Service, and delivering software through an AWS-native CI/CD pipeline built on AWS CodeBuild and Amazon ECR.