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For pharmaceutical industry veterans, November 2023 marks the end of a decade-long journey to “achieve interoperable, electronic tracing of products at the package level to identify and trace certain prescription drugs as they are distributed in the United States.”  This milestone will come with little fanfare, but with gigantic impact to the pharmaceutical supply chain.

Many major wholesalers are leading the charge for receiving aggregated data—requiring that manufacturers be able to digitally send pallet identifiers with corresponding digital details of all shipments sent to them. Without this data being aggregated, wholesale staff would have to open each pallet and manually scan each serialized product.  

Many New Year’s Resolutions are still in full force!  January’s optimism is holding strong with uncluttered calendars, new gym memberships and a sense of renewal and improvement.  

Preface: In this blog I’m going to assert that “the data associated with the drug and its supply chain transactions is just as important as the drug itself.” Disclaimer: The drug is certainly the most important part in the patient healthcare equation—data has nothing to do with that. BUT… there is a comprehensive data collection and integration reality that is required to get these drugs through the supply chain and eventually to the patients who need them. Ultimately, regulations like the...

While counterfeit goods can be found in just about every corner of the globe, in developed markets we used to associate them with street vendors and questionable public fairs or markets.

In March of 2020, we knew so much less than we do now about COVID-19. One thing we did know, however, was that testing would be a critical element in fighting the pandemic. Testing sites were established around the globe, with unprecedented demand. It was completely predictable that the “bad guys” would look to profit by introducing counterfeit tests into the market. And they did. I wrote about it then: https://blog.systechone.com/blog/counterfeit-coronavirus-covid19-tests

Is a deadline an obligation or an opportunity? That’s something many pharmaceutical companies, particularly in the US, are considering right now as they look ahead to November 27, 2023. This is the date when the aggregation of serialized products into serialized cases and onto serialized pallets becomes mandatory in the US—along with the corresponding data that is captured and made available to all stakeholders.Serialization was introduced by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as part of...

When you start a company, your goal is to create a popular and profitable product. You are decidedly not thinking about the fact that your product will get counterfeited and sent to the gray market when it does get popular. And trust me, that will happen.When I met with the American skincare brand OZNaturals® they were riding the wave of rapid growth and impressive success. The company was launched in 2013 by CEO Angela Irish with the goal of creating a range of clean, efficacious, and...

It’s almost peak holiday shopping season and consumers are once again on the lookout for that perfect gift. However, this year is unlike any other with the events of the last 18-months putting stress on supply chains around the world.