Impact of track and trace integration on pharmaceutical production systems

In today’s competitive economic environment, Track and Trace (the capability to determine present and past locations of products through the whole supply chain) is becoming a more and more urgent necessity and a key differentiator in many industries, enhancing pilferage reduction, counterfeit prevention and targeted recalls, and improving supply chain efficiency, synchronization, visibility and security. The pharmaceutical industry, together with food industry, is one of the most advanced in traceability systems implementation, as it has found to be largely affected by counterfeiting phenomenon. In this paper, a brief overview of traceability international regulations in the pharmaceutical sector and of the impact of its implementation on production processes and logistics will be carried on, in order to highlight the main drivers to its large and fast diffusion; technologies developed will be presented and criticalities and benefits of traceability systems implementation will be analyzed.