There is no one solution that will fit all legislative requirements or customer requests. The best approach is to be clear which markets are being supplied by which lines and therefore determine the minimum requirements for product compliance.
Companies then decide which approach they wish to adopt, above the basic requirements of legislative compliance at a corporate, geographic, or site level.

The data to be tracked and traced as the batch number, the expiry date, the productive plan, etc., are all summarized in a 2D Datamatrix code, which includes all information to be traced in a very limited space, if compared with traditional bar-codes. This code will be applied on the product by means of a printer and following read and verified by a camera vision system.

It is therefore essential that pharmaceutical industries sit down with key packaging equipment suppliers to agree the best approach for a phased, long-term, cost-effective, and sustainable program to suit their needs.

To cope with the Track & Trace process, labelling machines can be equipped with the following components:

• ink-jet, thermal-transfer, laser and hot-foil overprinting units to print bar-codes alphanumeric codes or 2D codes (Datamatrix)
• overprint control systems
• camera systems to control OCV/OCR
• 1D/2D or DM verification, presence, slope control, pattern matching, etc.

The offer may be completed with the possibility to apply and control RFID labels and integration with ePedigree and serialization systems.

Even if many of these activities are not IMA LIFE’s core business, its awareness of the importance of having a comprehensive offer to meet mass serialization increasing needs, brought to a close cooperation with specialized companies who have knowledge in vision systems and management information systems.

Ad-hoc solutions can be tailored to new packaging lines in order to meet with customer’s stringent and country specific requirements of the pharmaceutical industry.