How Product Serialization helps healthcare systems?

In the pharmaceutical and healthcare industry falsified and counterfeit products pose a global public health risk. These substandard drugs and surgical equipment are actively dangerous that can cause serious damage to the consumer's health. As the healthcare products are manufactured at multiple locations such as chemical synthesis in one country, assembly, and packing in another country- making it difficult to keep track of small units of the supply chain across the globe.

What is Product Serialization?

The process of labeling individual sealable units of inventory with a unique number. For inventory bulk operations, these numbers are assigned sequentially to the units belong to that bulk. These numbers can be numeric or alphanumeric. For products with subassemblies and different components such as electronics, medical devices, or home appliances, the individual component can also have their serial numbers.

Need of Serialization in Healthcare System

Healthcare and pharmaceutical sectors face a lot of challenges in their production, management, and supply chain operations. US Food and Drug Administration recommends that pharma companies must implement track and trace systems to enhance the security of the delivery of the right drugs and surgical instruments to customers.

1. To Improve Supply chain security

The serialization of the individual item will allow us to trace and track the product at a granular level. This will enhance the integrity of the supply chain and with item-level traceability healthcare systems gain a new level to efficiently manage and control supply chain operations.

2. For enhanced Trace and Trackability

The ability to track individual products at the smallest unit enables us to trace the medical products from the manufacturing level down to the consumer level. This helps to ascertain which products are authentic and legitimate and which are counterfeit as a product without a serial number are more likely to be duplicate.

3. For the Prevention of Price violations

If any unauthorized dealer or retailer is selling the product other than the advertised price product serialization gives a powerful tool to prevent them from doing so. The serial number of the product allows you to track down the vendor and identify which distributor was responsible for these violations and take a prompt response to remediate the situation.

4. To improve Quality Control

Product serialization makes quality control much easier. If any defect in the quality control process arise serial number will help to track the faulty device or equipment to their origin- the supplier for the source component and the date of manufacturing to trace the issue back to its root and prevent it from happening again.

5. To improve recall Management

For healthcare manufacturer recalls are a big tension. But serialization helps for faster resolution. Serial numbers give the information that exactly which units have defects and then these items can be easily traced back through the supply chain to identify where the defect has occurred. The necessary action can be taken to quickly fix the problem.

Conclusion

Product serialization can help in a big way to efficiently manage healthcare manufacturing and supply chain operations and keep away the threat of counterfeit and substandard drugs and equipment supply in the market. Although it takes time and cost for implementation the benefits are clear and greater in number. Check out how ERP Gold is helping healthcare systems to implement serialization to reap these benefits.

She is a Digital Marketing Strategist in a Software House based in the USA and offers Business Intelligent Solutions. She is writing articles and blog posts for the past six years.