Is Supply Chain Traceability a Must?
Suppliers, who are responsible for the end product, must know the origin of their products. It helps them trace a particular product back to its origin and verify every step involved in its production and distribution. As for the pharmaceutical industry, it is even more significant since the product involved is medicine. Accordingly, let us elaborate on the importance of supply chain traceability in the pharmaceutical industry.
The Significance of Traceability
The pharmaceutical supply chain involves several players of varying sizes and manufacturing roles, and capabilities. As a result, manufacturing a single type of tablet too involves the participation of many companies. As a result, it is pretty obvious that traceability becomes a legal requirement rather than just an industry need.
Of course, traceability has its unique benefits to offer that make it a must in the pharmaceutical supply chain. Let us look at a few of them to determine why supply chain traceability is a must across the pharma supply chain.
- Increased Supply Chain Visibility
Traceability allows suppliers to trace the origin of a particular product from the first stages of production to its current stage. As mentioned in the beginning, since suppliers are solely responsible for the product they deliver, they must know everything about it to ensure they do not miss out on any element of the supply chain.
That, precisely, refers to increased supply chain visibility, wherein every participant of the supply chain can trace the product across every stage. Unlike the olden days, where the supply chain, although intertwined, was pretty disconnected concerning the traceability aspect. That disallowed suppliers to look back into the supply chain. These limitations increased the complexities of the supply chain further.
- Maintaining the Effectiveness of Drugs
Enhanced supply chain visibility keeps suppliers across every stage informed about everything that has happened in the supply chain. That helps the entire supply chain maintain the effectiveness of medicines. Additionally, it helps reduce costs associated with counterfeits, recalls, and substandard drugs.
However, comprehensive traceability helps increase efficiency, reduce waste, foster collaboration to address and resolve industry-level problems, improve resilience and agility to project shortages, and prepare for potential crises by securing supply.
- Redundancy of Old Technologies
The pharmaceutical supply chain is quite prone to product quality concerns such as variance on account of ingredient concerns, contamination, formulation, or manual errors. Although many attempted to use EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) in the past, the technology doesn’t cover the complexities of contemporary supply chains.
EDI is projected to stay for years. However, it is essential to develop a supply network platform that will foster digital processes to offer comprehensive traceability, coupled with product quality and safety assurance.
- Root Cause Analysis
Enhanced visibility into the supply chain enables the investigation of the supply chain in its entirety, points out errors, and also determines the exact cause, along with the reason why it happened to help it avoid in the future.
Supply chain complexities are here to stay. However, while that’s a given, you don’t have to live with their challenges necessarily. Traceability, with the visibility it offers, along with its many benefits, proves an advantageous addition to the existing supply chain support. Further, with legal requirements evolving and becoming even more specific, traceability, as a sustainable solution, becomes a must.
Propix supports the pharmaceutical industry by providing its players with traceability solutions that enhance supply chain visibility and increase manufacturing efficiency. The company’s global outreach and the capability to harness the power of technology make it a significant partner across the pharma sector. For more, call +91-020-67526600.