Track & Trace

Despite numerous supply-chain upheavals inflicted by disasters in the last decade — including the eruption of a volcano in Iceland, the Japanese earthquake and tsunami, Thailand floods, and Hurricanes Maria and Harvey — most companies still found themselves unprepared for the Covid-19 pandemic.

There is a requirement that individually saleable units are serialized, but Catalent wisely made the decision to include an aggregation step in the process to increase the security and ease of traceability of their products. After discussing their needs, Catalent decided to use a mixture of automatic and manual methods to perform the serialization and aggregation step.

Counterfeit medicines have long been a very real threat to the pharmaceutical industry at all levels – from global suppliers through to contract manufacturers and distributors. Global government agencies have taken steps to strengthen protection against counterfeiting in response, adopting legislation aimed at making it more difficult for counterfeit drugs to enter the supply chain.

Advice comes day after UK decides to stop community tests and only test hospital cases. Countries should find and test every case of coronavirus to stop the pandemic, the World Health Organization has said a day after the UK announced that only the most seriously ill will be tested.

The study was launched as part of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Drug Supply Chain Security Act Pilot Project Program. The program is part of a broader effort to develop an electronic, interoperable system to track prescription drugs throughout the U.S. According to the Drug Supply Chain Security Act enacted in 2013, by 2023, pharmacists in the U.S. will be required to verify prescription drugs before they are dispensed.

To ensure traceability of the various pharmaceutical products from production to the point of distribution to patients, each product needs perfect coding. As thermal ink jet systems have already been used at STADA for a long time to code various products, it was decided to integrate a G320i thermal ink jet OEM board into the Mettler Toledo XS2MV checkweigher.

ADLINK Technology recently announced it has joined forces with Intel and Amazon Web Services (AWS) to simplify artificial intelligence (AI) at the edge for machine vision. The integrated solution offers an Amazon Sagemaker-built machine learning model optimized by and deployed with the Intel® Distribution of OpenVINO™ toolkit, the ADLINK Edge™ software suite and certification on AWS Greengrass.

Two initiatives by FDA this year aim to improve traceability. One, the “New Era of Smarter Food Safety Blueprint,” is expected to be rolled out in the first quarter and includes recommendations for using digital technology to improve traceability and food safety. The other initiative would create a list of high-risk foods, along with additional recordkeeping for those foods, by September, with a final rule due by November 2022. Both initiatives fall under the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA).

Today every industry has an app, be it Govt sectors, healthcare, banking, fashion, electronics, entertainment, or other utility apps. Customers can download these apps and perform various critical functions without having to go anywhere. Imagine just a decade ago; people would queue up to pay bills, today they download the service provider’s app and pay, from the comfort of their homes. This is the power of technology; it has made life simple, secure, and transparent.

A new blockchain consortium has formed following a pilot for compliance with the Drug Supply Chain Security Act (DSCSA). Last year IBM, Walmart, Merck, and KPMG participated in an FDA pharmaceutical blockchain interoperability pilot to track and trace pharmaceuticals for DSCSA legislation. Now, IBM says the pilot partners have formed a blockchain alliance called the Pharmaceutical Utility Network (PhUN).

Federico Piutti, Innovation Manager at Bormioli Pharma, believes track-and-trace technologies will be far more effective when applied directly to primary packaging, and with information being traced throughout the supply chain

The non-profit Digital Container Shipping Association (DCSA) has published a common set of processes along with data and interface standards for Track and Trace (T&T). The standards can be implemented by carriers, shippers and third parties to enable cross-carrier shipment tracking.

Technology has undoubtedly reshaped almost every part of society, changing how people communicate, travel and live, among other things. It also upended processes and practices in the manufacturing sector, including through these advancements.

It is now almost 6 years since Kizy Tracking was founded by professionals from the logistics, microelectronics and telecommunications industry. Their mission: to improve global supply chain operations by providing first-hand data about the status and location of shipments and assets everywhere in the world, in a cost-efficient way. We spoke with co-founder Bertrand Späth about the story behind Kizy.

Barcodes are one of the best ways to track and trace items. They’re found everywhere, in supermarkets, industrial warehouses, labs, and medical facilities. However, barcodes didn’t just appear out of nowhere; a lot of time, effort, and hard work went into their initial development. Here’s the story of how they were first designed and patented more than 70 years ago.

The World Economic Forum (WEF) has announced the launch of the first neutral and public traceability platform that is capable of visualising blockchain-based supply chain data from multiple organisations and sources. The platform has been developed to assist businesses across industries address the consumer demands for ethical and sustainable products.

A team from Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST), composed of Ph.D. Student Arnaud Delmotte, Professor Yasuhiro Mukaigawa, Associate Professor Takuya Funatomi, Assistant Professor Hiroyuki Kubo, and Assistant Professor Kenichiro Tanaka, has developed a new method to embed information in a 3D printed object and retrieve it using a consumer document scanner.

Sales of counterfeit drugs are disturbingly common around the world. Some patients end up not receiving necessary treatments, while others are harmed by ingesting whatever substances are inside the fake pills. Researchers at Purdue University have now come up with a way to tag medications so that forgers can’t do the same to their fakes.

The halal industry incorporates companies and businesses that are in need of financing and these financing needs can be met through Shariah-compliant financing. Halal food supply chain is an integral component of the halal industry. Companies in the halal industry, whose core competencies revolve around offering a halal product need not be deemed as Shariah-compliant by Shariah screening bodies and hence investment into these companies would not be permissible.

While 2019 saw the launch of naked fruit and veggies in some retail outlets, 2020 trends for packaging and labelling have seen predictions such as Smart Packaging, Transparent and clear labelling, 100% recyclable materials, edible packaging, minimalism and increased portability.

IBM, KPMG, Merck and Walmart have been selected by the United States Food and Drug Administration to be included in a pilot project in support of the U.S. Drug Supply Chain Security Act to identify, track and trace prescription medicines and vaccines distributed within the United States.

SoftGroup is a software company that provides end-to-end traceability technology to the pharmaceutical industry including serialization and aggregation processes.