Validaide brings collaboration into pharma logistics risk assessment

Validaide is a software company focused on lane risk assessment for pharmaceutical logistics. When pharmaceutical companies transport medicines, vaccines, and other temperature-sensitive products, they need to formally assess and document the risks associated with each shipment.

That assessment can involve multiple parties, including freight forwarders, trucking companies, airlines, ground handlers, warehouses, and packaging providers.

Validaide brings this process into a shared digital workspace. Users can define shipping lanes, select service providers, calculate lane risk scores, and collaborate on the assessment before it is reviewed and approved.

Moving collaboration beyond comments and email

Before adding chat, collaboration around a lane was largely handled through comments within the application, alongside the more traditional combination of spreadsheets and email used across the industry.

That approach becomes difficult when a risk assessment involves multiple companies, service providers, and thousands of potential shipping routes. Validaide wanted to make collaboration more immediate and keep the conversation connected to the lane being assessed.

The idea was simple: each shipping lane should have its own conversation.

When users open a lane, they should be able to see the relevant discussion, collaborate with the other parties involved, and keep the conversation alongside the risk assessment rather than switching between separate tools.

A chat for every shipping lane

Validaide's use case is different from a general-purpose team messenger.

A single lane can involve users from the same company as well as users from other companies participating in the assessment. Validaide therefore needed to support both company-specific conversations and cross-company collaboration.

The platform determines who is eligible to participate in each lane. Users can then be added to the corresponding group programmatically, allowing the chat membership to reflect the actual parties involved in that shipment or assessment.

This creates a direct connection between the application and the conversation:

Create a lane → identify the participants → create the conversation → collaborate in context.

Keeping regulated conversations available for the life of a lane

Retention was particularly important for Validaide.

A lane can remain active for years, and the conversation associated with it needs to remain accessible for as long as the lane exists. The team wanted users to be able to return to previous discussions rather than losing the context after a standard chat retention period.

CometChat's extended retention options allow Validaide to retain conversations beyond the standard period. The platform also provides APIs and webhooks that can be used to copy conversation data into Validaide's own systems when required for archival purposes.

This gives Validaide flexibility in how it manages long-lived assessment records, including the possibility of closing an old conversation and presenting it in a read-only state while starting a new conversation if collaboration needs to resume.

Building chat into the existing workflow

Validaide's application runs on a Symfony backend, with a web front end combining Twig, Vue, and custom JavaScript. The team wanted chat to feel like a native part of the existing application rather than sending users to a separate communication tool.

CometChat's APIs allow Validaide to control group creation and membership programmatically, while its chat functionality provides the underlying messaging experience.

The team can also control when users establish a WebSocket connection through CometChat's custom WebSocket connection capability. This gives Validaide control over when users become actively connected to the chat service, which is useful for an experience where chat appears directly on the lane page.

The result

Validaide is bringing real-time communication into the workflow where pharmaceutical logistics teams already conduct their risk assessments.

By moving collaboration from scattered comments, spreadsheets, and email into lane-specific conversations, Validaide is making pharmaceutical logistics risk assessment a more connected and collaborative process.