With U.S. FDA Drug Supply Chain Security Act (DSCSA) enforcement deadline for pharmaceutical manufacturers to apply serialized product identifiers on drug packages little more than a month away, Pineberry Manufacturing Inc. (Booth S-1432) is displaying its CartonTrac FC (Flat Carton) serialization system using Pharma Suite serialization software from Adents.
Meanwhile, at Adents’ booth (W-820), Pineberry is showcasing its SF Long Friction Feeder integrated with a Wolke printer, Cognex Camera and Adents Pharma Suite serialization software.
According to Pineberry, manufacturers, wholesale distributors, repackagers and pharmaceutical supply chains inherit the most benefits facing significant packaging line upgrades to meet the current and emerging regulations compliant with the DSCSA and the EU Falsified Medicines Directive (FMD).
“Putting aggregation in place offers operational benefits like inventory management and prevents the invasion of counterfeit drugs into many global communities. With serialization, wholesalers are able to identify inventory down to a specific unit and track it internally,” says Pineberry. “With aggregation, they could do that for both opened and sealed cases as well. It greatly simplifies cycle counting, which wholesalers periodically do to check their physical inventory against what their system thinks they have. Aggregation allows them to scan just the sealed case and instantly know the identities of all the individual units.”
The company recently announced that a major international pharmaceutical company began using a Pineberry CartonTrac Serialization and Aggregation system.
David McCharles, Pineberry’s President and CEO, notes, “As the cartons are combined, the serial number of the aggregated unit (parent) is associated with the multiple serial numbers of the individual cartons (child) contained within it, building a parent-child relationship as products move through the packaging stages of the pharmaceutical supply chain. It’s a full track-and-trace solution that leverages aggregation and helps to improve the customer’s inventory management performance. For example, if you need to determine a batch’s contents but do not want to open the case, you can now scan the QR code on the outside of the case to get the serial number. Then, using the aggregation parent-child relationship, you can determine the identity of all the contents. This is one of the reasons that aggregation can ease the material handling aspects of serialized projects in a warehouse environment, while maintaining the safety of consumers and ease-of-mind for pharmaceutical companies.”
