Axway to bolster patient safety and compliance for AstraZeneca
Track & Trace solution helps prevent counterfeiting and ensures security, flexibility and scalability
AstraZeneca has adopted US business inter-action networks company Axway’s Track & Trace solution to enhance patient safety and protect brand integrity through serialization of medicine packs, as part of a comprehensive product security strategy.
AstraZeneca identified the implementation of standardised item level serialisation – in combination with tamper evident packaging – as a powerful approach to preventing counterfeiting and reimbursement fraud and Axway’s Track & Trace solution was chosen as the unique product number repository.
Using the solution from Axway, AstraZeneca has increased product safety by securely collecting product security data for every pack of medicine of an increasing number of its brands in a global repository, which can be verified against packs within the supply chain. The Axway Track & Trace repository is now handling close to 100 million serialised product data records from the three global sites where item-level serialisation was first implemented. By the end of 2010, ten sites and a total of 33 production lines will be feeding serial numbers into the system, with further sites and lines planned to be connected in 2011.
‘We needed a solution that would be flexible and adaptable to fit with our approach,’ said said Christoph Krähenbühl, IS program manager, pack coding and product security at AstraZeneca Global Operations Information. ‘Axway had modules that provided a solid foundation for the solution AstraZeneca wanted to build. It really was a co-development project.’
Security and stability are very important to As-traZeneca, especially as large volumes of codes are continually added. Axway Track & Trace is now a central component of AstraZeneca’s global systems-based product security approach, and is used as an object-event repository of unique serial numbers.
‘The global growth of reimbursement fraud and counterfeit medicines has resulted in patient safety risks for both governments and pharmaceutical companies,’ said Dave Bennett, chief technology officer, Axway. ‘In response, some territories have imposed regulations requiring pharmaceutical manufacturers to actively counter reimbursement fraud and counterfeiting through careful control of their business interactions. The reporting to comply with these regulations is managed directly from Axway’s Track & Trace solution.’
Axway’s Track & Trace securely captures, retrieves, transfers and manages key product and serialised event data. The event repository supports EPCIS queries to retrieve commissioning, packaging and product movement events. In addition, it captures change-of-ownership and other financial events to provide a complete picture of the product lifecycle.
It offers central management of serial number generation and allocation and easily integrates with third-party systems, including SAP’s EPCIS system, allowing internal and external trusted parties to access product identification, location, and event data at any point in the supply chain.
It also fully supports global trade identification numbers (GTIN) and global location numbers (GLN) for product and location identification and manages global compliance regulations for numerous countries, including emerging mandates in Turkey, Brazil, Israel and the US.
‘As Axway’s solution has evolved, the new version enables us to benefit from moving to the GS1 standards-based system EPC Information Services (EPCIS) that reduces the cost and complexity of com-plying with regulations,’ added Krähenbühl. ‘Even though we have recently seen a surge of such requirements, we have not yet met a requirement that our adaptable, standards-based solution, built on Ax-way Track & Trace, cannot handle.’
