Digitising the supply chain By Dr Alex Cole, Head of Strategic Marketing, CPI
The time has come for companies supplying the pharma industry to embrace digital technologies to increase sustainability, reduce costs and provide better patient support.
chain. Ensuring that end users, who
to act as an enabler for additional
what is in the pack, how to take
these companies have already
are ultimately patients, understand the drugs, as well as what side
effects could be experienced, is
not only key to ensuring regulatory
approval, but also supports patient
want to reduce. While that is true,
packaging also delivers significant value across the supply chain. It
clearly protects goods and gives information on how to transport and store the goods, but it also
gives information on the correct
use of the goods. For pharma, this is especially important. Ensuring that medicine packs have the correct shipping and storage
conditions is key to maintaining the quality of the product, especially
where that medicine requires cold
invested in serialisation, so now
is the time to start getting more value from that investment.
safety and adherence.
There exists today a whole plethora
More recently, driven by legislation,
through smart tags to complex
pharma has introduced and Packaging is a cost that we all
functionally is huge. Plus, many of
applied different printed codes,
including the global adoption of serialisation. In many markets, each pack has its own unique
identifier. For example, in the EU,
driven by the Falsified Medicines
Directive, each pack has a unique identifier, ie a DataMatrix symbol that includes at least product
of technologies from printed codes electronic systems that can add
value to packaging in the pharma industry. However, we should
concentrate on the value rather than the technology at play, the
industry needs to be technology
agnostic, focusing on the solutions that provide that value. So where could we add value?
code, serial number, batch number
Supply chain security (and
each pack is therefore uniquely
The strict controls, driven by
and expiration date. As a result,
coded. Many pharma companies have adopted the same
DataMatrix standard which means that the possibilities for packaging
patient safety)
legislation and regulation, that
exist within the pharmaceutical
industry are designed to ensure high degrees of demonstrable
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