TraceLink Inc., the world’s largest track-and-trace network for connecting the Life Sciences supply chain and eliminating counterfeit prescription drugs from the global marketplace, today announced the completion of an industry pilot for DSCSA compliance using GS1 EPCIS 1.1 data exchange on the Life Sciences Cloud. The successful pilot, conducted between a top-5 pharmaceutical manufacturer and one of the “big three” wholesale distributors in the U.S., adds to TraceLink’s growing list of industry-first EPCIS milestones, including:
- Becoming the first company in the life sciences industry to support large-scale commercial EPCIS deployments of more than 69,000 serialized shipments in September of 2011
- Unveiling the first life sciences compliance solution to adopt EPCIS-based implementation guidelines for Brazil in August 2015
- Winning the 2015 GS1 Brazil Automation Award in November 2015 for its partnership with Roche and SPI, which connected Roche to over a dozen supply chain partners on the Life Sciences Cloud using the EPCIS 1.1-based GS1 Brazil Medicine Traceability Guideline data exchange standards
“EPCIS has always been a core component of the Life Sciences Cloud to ensure the pharmaceutical supply chain will be able to exchange and manage the massive volume of data and transactions that will occur as global markets transition to item-level drug serialization, starting with the U.S. in 2017,” said Shabbir Dahod, President and CEO of TraceLink. “We’re proud to have been the first solution provider in the market to support life sciences commercial shipments with EPCIS back in 2011, and now to be live in production supporting serialized product with EPCIS 1.1 messages for DSCSA more than a year before the November 2017 deadline.”
Recent DSCSA EPCIS 1.1 Pilot Demonstrates Proven Capabilities of TraceLink Life Sciences Cloud
In the fall of 2015, TraceLink worked with a top-5 pharmaceutical manufacturer, one of the “big three” wholesale distributors in the U.S. to develop, deploy and test serialization data exchange pilots for commercialized product using GS1 EPCIS 1.1. These pilots were designed to test real-world scenarios, managing the preparation, exchange and verification of serialized product information in a production environment for commercial product.
EPCIS support is a critical foundation for serialization data exchange across the pharmaceutical supply chain, and the Life Sciences Cloud is the only platform capable of processing large-scale EPCIS events that contain very high serial number unit volumes. In the month of February 2016, TraceLink processed over 1,300 EPCIS events with more than 10,000 serialized units per event—and more than 230 EPCIS events with more than 100,000 serialized units per event. TraceLink can process these large-scale EPCIS events at operational speed, where traditional databases take hours to do the same. As a result, TraceLink customers are able to run their serialized operations and maintain the same level of productivity and efficiency they experienced prior to shipping products with serialization information.
