Sponsored: Extracting Value Beyond Compliance From Serialization

Companies are spending hundreds of millions of dollars, euros, rupees and rubles getting ready to comply with serialization regulatory mandates around the world.  Deadlines are fast approaching in the US and the EU and they are already passed in India, South Korea, Argentina and Turkey.  What companies are looking for next is how to extract some value beyond just complying with government mandates.  Just about every solution provider offering serialization components and solutions out there has at least one product or service that is aimed squarely at this type of need.  What we need to do is get these people together:  those who are looking, and those who have the solutions.

Cognizant, a management consulting company, has written a very nice 11-page white paper exploring value beyond compliance.  IQPC is offering it to everyone today to highlight their upcoming Pharma Traceability conference in Princeton, NJ on June 7-8, 2018.  In that event, they plan to focus on Serialization Value Beyond Compliance (VBC) ideas and concepts.  Get Cognizant’s white paper here.

Cognizant’s paper “…explores the many ways that new serialization capabilities can be utilized to drive business value across corporate functions and activities, thus enhancing the return on investment (ROI) to achieve regulatory compliance, globally.”  What I find interesting is that so few of the VBC ideas discussed in the industry and in this paper actually rely on the serial number applied to units or cases under the mandates.  But that doesn’t make the ideas and the value extracted any less valid.  What they use is the new IT infrastructure added to supply chain operations as the result of serialization mandates.  It’s that new infrastructure that enables these new VBC ideas and concepts.

As Cognizant puts it, “A serialization and track-and-trace infrastructure can be used to capture and extract business transaction events (i.e., shipments, receipts and suspect products) and provide data and event management feedback in real time to support KPI monitoring, supply chain dashboards, support inventory and cold chain monitoring, and decision support.”  That’s an important realization.

But there are also VBC uses of the new serial number too, particularly for significantly lowering the cost of brand protection and for chargeback reconciliation (see “Your Plain Old Package: Unlock Its Built-in Brand Protection Capability” and “Aggregation –> Chargeback Accuracy –> ROI”).  Get the Cognizant paper now and plan to attend the IQPC Pharma Traceability conference in June where these topics will be explored further.  Vendors of VBC solutions and components should also be there to show off those offerings and demonstrate how pharma companies would extract that extra value by deploying them.  This is the next opportunity for everyone to get some of their investments back in the form of better operational control, better visibility and better decisions.

Dirk.