AntTail and AWS Partner Mendix Streamline the Pharmaceutical Supply Chain on AWS

AntTail uses AWS Partner Mendix’s low-code solution and AWS services to quickly develop Internet of Things (IoT) apps that streamline the pharmaceutical supply chain and deliver quality products to patients. Using Mendix on AWS, pharmaceutical IoT services company AntTail developed an app in 6 weeks that monitors the temperature of medications and vaccines throughout the supply chain. The app processes 10,000 records in less than 1 second, leading to a 100 percent success rate in tracking and alarming, which helps to keep medicines at their proper temperatures.

The pharmaceutical industry’s supply chain for medication and vaccines is long and complex, leaving a lot of room for error. If the products are not made, stored, and transported correctly, they could deteriorate, leading to adverse effects for patients or the loss of millions of dollars for pharmaceutical companies that must recall the supply.

AntTail, a technology services provider, was founded to help the pharmaceutical industry simplify and bring transparency to the supply chain. The startup reached out to AWS Partner Mendix, a Siemens business that’s a leader in low-code application development solutions, to quickly build solutions for pharmaceutical companies. Using Mendix and Amazon Web Services (AWS) services, AntTail developed an IoT app in 6 weeks that has a 100 percent success rate in monitoring medication temperatures during last-mile delivery and improved medication storage at patients’ homes.

AntTail created IoT sensors that automatically gather data throughout the supply chain and deliver insights to pharmaceutical entities, doctors and pharmacists, and logistics companies. “We decided to create something for the pharmaceutical industry that would do away with as much human interfacing as possible and be rock solid, error free, and compliant with all regulations so that people could trust the system,” says Mark Roemers, cofounder of AntTail.

A startup with less than 10 people, AntTail needed to rapidly build applications that integrate with its IoT sensors. In 2014, it turned to Mendix, which provides a low-code solution to develop applications up to 10 times faster and with 70 percent fewer resources than traditional development. “We improve speed, collaboration, and control by making software development visual,” says Maarten de Vries, program manager for the AWS Mendix Alliance at Mendix. “Users don’t see a screen of code; they see a visual diagram of what the application will do and look like. That breaks down the wall between business and IT—business domain experts can be brought into software development.” Both the public Mendix Cloud and Mendix’s private cloud use AWS services, including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which offers secure and resizable compute capacity for virtually any workload.

As AntTail has grown, its sensors have amassed hundreds of millions—or maybe even billions—of records. One warehouse contains 650 IoT sensors, called Rugged AntTail Tags, or RATs, to monitor temperature; one sensor holds about 105,000 records per year. The startup used Mendix’s relational database at first, but in 2016, it sought a robust, scalable database solution on AWS. AntTail chose to run Apache Hadoop—an open-source software library that facilitates the distributed processing of large datasets across clusters of computers—on Amazon EC2 and to use Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) to automatically distribute incoming application traffic across multiple targets and virtual appliances in one or more Availability Zones.

Even AntTail employees without a development background can quickly build on Mendix. “We’re not limited to what’s inside Mendix to make our applications,” says Roemers. “Our staff love Mendix because they can do 90 percent of the work in 10 percent of the time, and they can add their own Java code. The modularity of Mendix helps us. If we need to upgrade or change to a more ideal software, we need to do it at only one point.”

Over the course of 6 weeks, the AntTail team used Mendix to build an application that works with small ANT sensors to measure the temperature of medicine shipped to patients in a refrigerator box during the “last mile” of the supply chain. The sensor also measures light conditions so that it can detect when a box has been opened; when a patient does not open the box to take medication at the prescribed times, the app sends a text reminder. AntTail also developed bespoke fridges that can be installed at patients’ homes, which improved the number of medications stored within the correct limits from less than 10 percent to 99 percent.

About 5,500 ANT sensors have been implemented across Azerbaijan, Australia, South Africa, Latin America, the United States, and Europe, with another 5,000 in production in early 2023. The application processes 10,000 records in less than 1 second, which leads to a 100 percent success rate in tracking and alarming. “This could help to improve delivery of quality medicine to patients in poorer countries where warehousing and keeping products cool are more difficult,” says Roemers.

Another AntTail app built on Mendix creates a heat map of a warehouse in only 3–4 minutes, which the warehouse can use to get a government permit to store medication and vaccines and to satisfy audits. This mapping app was developed in cooperation with a large pharmaceutical company and built in 2 months. The solution monitors the warehouse temperature 24/7 and sends an alarm by email or text if the temperature is not compliant. Adding a new warehouse with 650 sensors takes only a couple of hours to configure with the AntTail application, whereas it would take a huge financial investment and 8–10 days for a warehouse to install its own 650 wired sensors. Using wireless sensors requires replacing the batteries in each sensor every year, but AntTail’s RAT sensors run for 8 years without needing maintenance or calibration. “It’s cheaper to have 650 AntTail sensors in a warehouse,” says Roemers. “Customers save on the total cost of ownership and all the hassle they’d otherwise have with recreating a heat map of the warehouse.”

Using Mendix and AWS, AntTail protects its customers from data and product loss. The startup handles the temperature-control logistics for the COVID-19 vaccinations for Uruguay, accounting for 3.7 million people. After 2 years, it calculated 0 percent data loss, and the only product loss was when a helicopter carrying six cases of vaccines crashed. “We use the backup from AWS, but we use it in a different server park, so it’s an off-site backup,” says Roemers. “We can mitigate risk very well.”

Working alongside AWS, AntTail completed a software mapping project in late 2022 and will use it to guide its migration to AWS microservices by the end of 2023. In particular, it will use Amazon EMR, a cloud big data solution for petabyte-scale data processing, interactive analytics, and machine learning using open-source frameworks. “Apache Hadoop on Amazon EMR caters to the flexibility, scalability, and stability that we need,” says Roemers.

These capabilities will prove useful as pharmaceutical companies have been updating their supply chain technology during the COVID-19 pandemic. “We’ve always had great support from Mendix and the AWS team for the questions or issues that we run into,” says Roemers. “AWS provides specialists who connect us with the resources we need.”