Poll Reveals Lack of Confidence in Contract Service Orgs, Line Vendors

TraceLink Inc., provider of track-and-trace networking for connecting the life sciences supply chain and providing real-time information sharing for better patient outcomes, recently held its annual NEXUS 17 conference in Barcelona.

In addition to discussions about achieving valuable benefits beyond compliance, attendees also responded to questions about serialization preparation, challenges, and trade partner readiness.

Interactive polling results at the conference revealed that:

• When asked about relationships with their contract manufacturing organization (CMO) and contract packaging organization (CPO) partners, sixty eight percent of pharmaceutical companies that responded felt their CMOs and/or CPOs are not well prepared to meet serialization requirements.

• Respondents noted that the greatest serialization challenge thus far has been line vendors' inability to deliver a solution on time and within scope (47 percent). The second most cited challenge was lack of Level 3 functionality and flexibility to fulfill business requirements in the solution (26 percent).

• Eighty nine percent of respondents believe their CMOs should integrate serialization into their current packaging lines with data management.

78 percent of attendees believe end-to-end visibility of pharmaceutical products in the supply chain is achievable within the next five years, with information sharing between trading partners cited as one of the most valuable business benefits.

While information sharing is seen as one of the biggest benefits, it’s also of great concern, with almost half (48 percent) of respondents preparing for serialization indicating that they are most worried about the exchange of information. Testing and validation of systems was reported as another big concern at 21 percent.

To access the full polling data results from NEXUS 17, download the Serialization Snapshot: The Current State of Readiness.