It is time for pharmaceutical companies and their supply chain partners to establish clear expectations for projects. Due to increasing drug integrity concerns, more than 40 nations have introduced track-and-trace laws to help regulate products as they go through the supply chain. 75% of the world's prescription medications are secured by legislation. While no two nations have passed precisely the same requirements, they all depend on one core component: serialization. Serializing products by allocating unique, traceable numbers to individual saleable units is the foundation of all the regulations.

Serialization is a complex process that will have an expanding influence all throughout operations at both pharmaceutical companies and their contract manufacturing and packaging partners. The process of implementing serialization goes a long way beyond simply creating a number and affixing it to the product. Serialization introduces a change in the outlook for the business. With serialization, the focus evolves to producing the same product, identifying everything with unique data, imparting that information to supply chain partners, and afterward, dependent upon your supply chain role, potentially accounting for that data for a long time to come.