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Avoid these EPCIS interoperability pitfalls

One of the greatest challenges facing the pharmaceutical supply chain is hooking up multiple ERP systems and business applications across the supply chain, spanning the manufacturer, contract packager, wholesaler/distributor, and pharmacies. Ensuring interoperability of the data across the supply chain is a challenge, even if all parties adopt GS1’s EPCIS standard.

Pfizer recently shared the results of an EPCIS pilot test it conducted with McKesson, during a webinar it conducted with Tracelink  in April 2012. All participants in the pilot were well-versed in EPCIS, yet they still ran into interoperability issues because different companies were using and interpreting the standards in different ways.

Because the EPCIS standard was designed to be highly flexible to support a variety of use cases across many industries, there is room for different interpretations of how those standards might be applied.

Here are the interoperability pitfalls Pfizer uncovered:

1. All trading partners must adopt the EPCIS guidelines in the same way.  This includes:
• Rules for common use of GLN, DEA, or HIN for identifying Sold From, Ship From, Sold To, and Ship To parties
• Common interpretation of what value to assign to data elements: Sold To is different from Bill To
• How to represent the Sold From and Sold To party if they lack a GLN
• Agreement on which method should be used for the business transactional identifier, since several are allowed in the GS1 core business vocabulary—for example, PO Number, ASN Number, RMA Number, etc.

2. All trading partners must follow a common interpretation of EPCIS events and extensions for each use case. This includes:
• Shipping product, confirming product receipt, returning product, confirming return receipt, shipping a repackaged product, exception use cases, etc.
• Which combination of EPCIS events is used for each use case
• Which event business steps and dispositions are used
• Which GS1 US Healthcare extension data elements are used
• Which data elements are truly required versus optional for each use case
• When a data element is optional in the XML schema, when is it conditionally required for a specific use case
• The GS1 US Rx Guideline spells out the exact format of each and every EPCIS event and attribute.

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