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LogiPharma USA 2026See Saga Card at booth 608, Sheraton Boston, 5 to 7 October 2026.Meet the Controlant team

Saga Card

Visibility down to the single unit

Saga Card is a cellular tracker smaller than a credit card, designed with pharma for the pharma supply chain. It sits inside the carton or the shipper box and keeps reporting after the pallet is broken down, with nothing to install at the receiving end.

Start up a pilotSee use cases
Saga Card, front and back: a white card the size of a credit card with a QR code on the front and certification marks on the back

The challenge

Today, the monitoring stops at the pallet break

One pallet becomes thousands of packs. The device stays with the pallet. The value, the chain of custody and the obligation go with every pack.

Before Saga Card: pallets carry a Saga device and report live from the plant to five distribution hubs across the United States. Then each pallet breaks into single units, on to wholesalers, pharmacies and clinics and thousands of patients, spread where people live, and none of them reports. Then Saga Card is switched on: a line sweeps across the map and every unit turns live, reporting for itself. Illustrative network. Illustrative network

Different applications

Six ways to place the card in the supply chain, from the secondary pack to the pallet. Scroll to see how each works.

  1. 01Medicine box

    On a folded leaflet in the secondary medicine box

  2. 02Shipper box

    On top of the medicine packs in a shipper box

  3. 03Clinical kit

  4. 04Diagnostics kit

  5. 05Parcel box

    In a reusable parcel shipment box

  6. 06Pallet

    On the pallet, inside its thermal blanket, for asset tracking

01 · Medicine box

On a folded leaflet in the secondary medicine box

End-to-end unit tracking

Challenge

Each partner tracks only its own leg, so no one holds a continuous record of the pack from the line to the patient.

Solution

The card rides on the leaflet inside the serialized pack and reports its location, and temperature where needed, across every partner, end to end.

Direct to patients

Challenge

A single pack to a home has no return leg, no reader and nobody trained to operate a device.

Solution

The card reports temperature and location to the door, with nothing for the patient or nurse to operate.

02 · Shipper box

On top of the medicine packs in a shipper box

Inventory transparency

Challenge

Downstream planning runs on late partner reports, so actual position and dwell time in the channel are invisible.

Solution

A sampled share of shipper boxes reports actual position and dwell time. A box sitting in a depot uses almost no battery.

Temperature monitoring

Challenge

Shipper boxes usually carry a passive logger that is read only on arrival, or no monitoring at all. Any excursion is found only when the box is opened, too late to act on it.

Solution

One card per box reports temperature and location during transit, so you learn about an excursion while you can still act on it.

03 · Clinical kit

Inside a clinical kit, alongside the investigational product

Challenge

Clinical kits travel to trial sites and back with custody recorded on paper, so when a kit goes missing or arrives out of range, it is hard to show where it was and who had it. A device sized for the shipper box does not fit inside the kit.

Solution

The card fits inside the kit and records location and temperature, from packager to site and back. Custody no longer depends on paper, and the kit's whole journey is on the record.

Built for the pharma cold chain, down to the single unit

Saga Card from the front, 47.50 mm wide and 75.50 mm tallSaga Card from the side, 7.16 mm thick

  • Fits below the pallet

    A form factor that travels inside a case, a carton, a tote or a single pack, wherever the monitoring needs to sit.

  • Smaller than a credit card, lighter than an AA battery

    47.5 × 75.5 × 7.2 mm and about 18 g. A standard credit card is 85.6 × 54 mm, and an alkaline AA battery weighs about 23 g.

  • Shop floor ready

    A high-speed reader in production activates and pairs cards to serialized packs at line rate. The app does the same anywhere else.

  • One scan status

    Anyone holding the card scans the device, by its QR code or over NFC, and sees condition and location. No app, no login, nothing to train pharmacies, couriers or patients on.

Where it fits

Where Saga Card sits among tracking devices

Saga device, covers Pallet to Box, reports on its own.
Saga Card, covers Pallet to Secondary package, reports on its own.
BLE label, covers Box to Carton, needs a reader or parent.
Passive indicator, covers Carton to Unit or dose, needs a reader or parent.

What reporting from the unit makes possible

  • Real time, at the individual pack

    Position and condition of the unit itself, not the box it left the warehouse in.

  • Nothing to install at the far end

    A pharmacy back room, a clinic, a patient's hallway: no reader, no gateway, nobody to tap.

  • One record that survives the break-down

    The pallet splits, the box is opened, the parent device goes elsewhere. The unit keeps reporting.

Saga Card reports to the same Controlant platform as the Saga devices, and is activated and paired with an NFC tap in the Controlant App.

The Saga Card loop

Re-use the card. Lower the cost and the CO2 of every shipment

No charging between uses. One scan on return tells you if the card can go out again. Only cards near the end of their life go back to Controlant.

Job 1, Clinical kits and samples: battery 100% to 70%. Job 2, Temperature-controlled drug product: battery 70% to 38%. Job 3, Samples return: battery 38% to 6%. After jobs 1 and 2 the card goes straight back out. After job 3 the scan shows near end of life, and the card goes back to Controlant.

Illustration · illustrative data

The device

Smaller than a credit card, lighter than an AA battery

Dimensions, to scale

Saga Card from the front: a white card with the Controlant logo, a QR code over the line "Scan QR code for device information", and "Saga Card, Engineered in Iceland and Manufactured in Mexico" printed near the footSaga CardFrontSaga Card from the side: a thin white profile with a bevelled lower edgeSideSaga-P Standard device, white face with the probe port capped, screen reading a shipment in progress at 23.5 °CSaga-P Standard61 mm wide
20 mm
Saga Card, a Saga-P Standard and a credit card, by size and weight
ObjectWidth × height × depth (mm)Weight
Saga Card47.5 × 75.5 × 7.2About 18 g
Saga-P Standard61 × 103 × 25197.5 g
Credit card85.6 × 53.98
One scale, one baseline. Saga Card is 47.5 × 75.5 × 7.2 mm, a smaller footprint than a credit card. It is about 10 times lighter than the Saga-P Standard beside it and about 6 times smaller by volume.Source: Saga Card from its specification; the Saga-P Standard from its datasheet
Dimensions
47.5 × 75.5 × 7.2 mm
A standard credit card is 85.6 × 54 mm
Weight
About 18 g
Location
Under 20 m via Wi-Fi
Activation
NFC tap, by app or reader
Interface
Screenless, QR code for status from any phone
Temperature
−30 to +50 °C, with limited wake-ups below −10 °C, where the use case needs it
Logging
Temperature every 10 minutes. Duration depends on each use case and wake-up interval
All specifications
Enclosure
Sealed polypropylene
Connectivity
LTE-M and NB-IoT
Battery
Airline-approved lithium, flight-mode detection
Origin
Engineered in Iceland, manufactured in Mexico

Battery life depends on the wake-up setup for each use case. The card reports low battery before it stops, not after.

Which use case is yours?

Tell us where Saga Card would fit, and we'll be in touch.

Start up a pilotSee how you can manage Saga Card from the Controlant App