Your courier logistics layer, managed end to end.
You focus on pharmacy operations. We handle the courier layer — audits, optimization, incidents, RFPs, and reporting — as a managed service, not a tool you install. We run the audits, write the RFPs, manage the couriers, and report monthly, so your team runs the pharmacy, not the delivery desk.
Ship Steward is a managed courier-logistics service for specialty and long-term-care pharmacies — an embedded team plus a forensic platform that audits every courier invoice, optimizes routes, tracks incidents, runs RFPs, and reports to leadership, managing your third-largest spend from pick up to paid.
The courier layer nobody owns daily
Drawn from the operational gaps we hear most across multi-site pharmacy networks.
Invoices Arrive Too Late to Audit
By the time the courier invoice lands, the week is gone and there’s no structured way to dispute a line.
Nothing to Negotiate Against
Route-based billing with no normalized data — and couriers combining routes and billing separately.
Incidents Vanish
No single view of driver-level issues across locations, so accountability disappears between sites.
RFPs Run by Inbox
Bids are slow, fragmented, and impossible to compare apples-to-apples.
Courier Management — the team that runs it all
One dedicated function owns your courier layer end to end. Every service below is included in that engagement.
The Embedded Team
A dedicated Ship Steward owns courier relationships site by site, audits every invoice and chases every credit, drives RFPs and rate negotiations, and is your single point of accountability per region — on a weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, and quarterly cadence.
Courier Management →The Platform Powering It
A forensic audit engine, a three-phase route optimizer built for LTC, I2R incident tracking, TimeKeeper ops reporting, an RFP workflow, and executive dashboards — all fed by the same normalized data, all behind one accountable team.
See the components →Six services, one managed layer
Two savings engines and four operational modules — the underlying components of Courier Management.
Invoice Audit
Late, fragmented courier invoices turned into normalized, auditable data — every line reconciled against route and stop data, overcharges flagged and recovered.
Learn more →Route Optimization
Three-phase optimization built for LTC constraints — the cheapest compliant plan before the courier ever bills. This is what produced Gallatin.
Learn more →Incident Management (I2R)
CC us on the emails you already send. Every delivery issue auto-ticketed, AI-triaged, and chased to resolution — with a record the courier can’t dispute at invoice time.
Learn more →TimeKeeper
Pharmacy-ops reporting that shows where the delay actually comes from — order entry, approval, production, or courier release — with a reason at every handoff.
Learn more →RFP Support
We write the package from your audit data, manage the courier pool, validate every bid apples-to-apples, and support the award — competitive bids on normalized data, not email threads.
Learn more →Executive Dashboards & Scorecards
One CFO/COO-ready rollup of spend, savings, and courier performance across every location — a Shipper Dashboard and a Courier Scorecard fed by the same audit engine.
Learn more →Measured against the invoice
Same pharmacies, same couriers — a different operating layer. Realized client results.
Figures are realized client actuals. Site-level opportunity estimates (e.g. identified or directional savings on a partial sample) are labelled as such on each service page and confirmed only by a full audit.
Load, audit, optimize — then run it
A concrete, phased rollout across your footprint.
Days 1–30 · Load & Baseline
Ingest delivery-track data, build per-site rate cards, normalize prior invoices, and stand up dashboards — a per-site baseline of miles, stops, routes, and spend.
Days 31–60 · Audit & Identify
Reconcile data against rate cards line by line, surface optimization, credit, and rate-gap opportunities, and deliver a site-by-site report ranked by ROI.
Days 61–90 · Optimize & Implement
Run optimization, launch RFPs where rate gaps exist, push the first wave of credits back through couriers, and kick off TimeKeeper and Incident Management.
Questions buyers ask
What is Ship Steward, exactly?
Ship Steward is a managed courier-logistics service for specialty and long-term-care pharmacies — an embedded team plus a forensic platform that audits every courier invoice, optimizes routes, tracks incidents, runs RFPs, and reports to leadership. It manages your third-largest spend end to end, not a slice of it.
Is this software we install, or a service you run?
A service. We run the audits, write the RFPs, manage the couriers, and report monthly — powered by our platform, but operated by a dedicated team on your side of the table. There’s nothing for your staff to install or operate.
How does Ship Steward compare to a freight-audit firm or generic route software?
Parcel-audit firms only touch FedEx and UPS small-parcel; generic route software dispatches and never audits. Ship Steward owns the whole dedicated-courier spend lifecycle — plan, perform, audit, recover — and a team works it daily.
What does it cost?
One managed-service price: a percentage of the freight under management, with no minimums or setup fees. It scales as sites come on or off, and recovered spend typically outruns the fee inside the first quarter.
One scope. One price. One accountable team.
Every service here is included in a single managed engagement — priced as a percentage of the freight under management, scaling as sites come on or off. An asset, not an expense.
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