On the final day of our Plus3 trip to Greece, we got to visit a unique company called AlfaOmega, specializing in pharmaceutical logistics. The visit began with an overview of what the company does and how it operates. Afterwards, we got to tour the main warehouse where the pharmaceutical products that it transports are sorted for deliveries. The first area we got to see was the unloading area, where new shipments of pharmaceutical products were delivered. One thing unique to this type of logistics company is that it has to account for maintaining precise and cool temperatures for many of the specialized products it handles. Therefore, in the first unloading area, we were shown curtains that close around the end of a semitruck’s trailer to keep it sealed with the rest of the warehouse to maintain a cool temperature. Then this fragile cargo is immediately taken to a large specialized freezer room that keeps a temperature of around five degrees Celsius with an average transportation time of around thirty seconds. Besides their unique dealings with cold storage, the company also has some specialized gadgets to handle the large amount of inventory they need to sort and store. The packing process we observed began with workers picking the orders. There were specialized portable shelves that could hold up to 20 packages of pharmaceuticals, which the user could use to pack orders. The workers also have special scanners to quality check each order to ensure that the end destination receives the proper order. After the orders were packed, there were these automated shrink wrap devices that spun the pallets around as they automatically wrapped, which I thought was cool, and these devices allowed for increased efficiency for the workers, as they only had to sort and package into boxes. After the pallets were wrapped, other workers utilized a fleet of electric-powered forklifts to handle the heavy lifting of the packaged pallets to store until it was time for the delivery vehicles to transport the order to their destination.





