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.

Packaging is a cost that we all 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 chain. Ensuring that end users, who are ultimately patients, understand what is in the pack, how to take the drugs, as well as what side effects could be experienced, is not only key to ensuring regulatory approval, but also supports patient safety and adherence.

More recently, driven by legislation, pharma has introduced and 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 code, serial number, batch number and expiration date. As a result, each pack is therefore uniquely coded. Many pharma companies have adopted the same DataMatrix standard which means that the possibilities for packaging to act as an enabler for additional functionally is huge. Plus, many of these companies have already invested in serialisation, so now is the time to start getting more value from that investment.

There exists today a whole plethora of technologies from printed codes through smart tags to complex 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?

Supply chain security (and patient safety) The strict controls, driven by legislation and regulation, that exist within the pharmaceutical industry are designed to ensure high degrees of demonstrable