NORTH READING, MA--(Marketwired - Aug 17, 2016) - 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 that it has been named to the steering committee for the Open Serialization Communication Standard (Open-SCS) Working Group, a consortium driven by healthcare providers to directly address the healthcare industry's product serialization regulations over the next decade. With a seat on the steering committee, TraceLink will actively participate with the Open-SCS Working Group to lead the initiative around implementing global standards to enable substantial patient safety benefits and reduce total healthcare costs.
Driven by pharmaceutical manufacturers and the solution providers' supporting them, the Open-SCS initiative is designed to enhance interoperability across serialization activities and the systems performing these activities from the equipment level (ISA L1) and packaging line (ISA L2) to site operational management (ISA L3) and enterprise serialization functions (ISA L4).
"An open communication standard that is independent of proprietary architectures and data exchange protocols provides a significant advantage for pharmaceutical manufacturers and other members of the supply chain facing massive rollout of serialization solutions to meet emerging track and trace regulations," said Marcel de Grutter, Executive Director, Open-SCS and IT Business Relationship Manager at Abbott. "The development and adoption of interoperability standards like those being developed by the Open-SCS Working Group greatly reduces risk and cost across the supply chain. We are pleased to welcome TraceLink as a key contributor into this effort."
The Open-SCS Working Group is partnered with the OPC Foundation to develop an open source standard in the Packaging Serialization Global Name Space Registry and to develop a set of standard information exchange specifications for serialization from packaging line to the enterprise.
"The globalization of serialization is creating significant complexity for pharmaceutical companies and contract manufacturers as they are increasingly using multiple serialization line vendors across sites and enterprises," said Lucy Deus, vice president of product management, TraceLink and board member for Open-SCS. "Open-SCS seeks to leverage the OPC Unified Architecture to develop a set of broadly adopted information exchange standards for serialization and packaging line operations that will act in harmony with the GS1 EPCIS standards developed for supply chain interoperability. The goal is to create a plug and play environment for serialization implementation to help the industry reduce cost, risk and time."
"The OPC Foundation strongly supports this important standards effort launched by leaders like TraceLink across the global pharmaceutical supply chain," said Thomas J. Burke, president and executive director of the OPC Foundation. "The development and broad adoption of practical open standards has been our mission since day one and this effort will be a key foundation in realizing the benefits of the Internet of Things (IoT) across the pharmaceutical serialization ecosystem."
Interoperability standards form an integral part of the TraceLink Life Sciences Cloud, the only secure and validated cloud solution with a proven network model designed specifically for life sciences companies. Built on the Amazon Web Services global cloud infrastructure, the Life Sciences Cloud supports a variety of widely adopted standard, such as GS1 EPCIS, designed to reduce risk and speed time to compliance for all members of the pharmaceutical supply chain.
To learn more about TraceLink's standards-based and flexible serialization, track and trace, and reporting platform for the U.S., the EU, China, Brazil, South Korea, India, Turkey, Argentina and other countries, please visit www.tracelink.com.
About TraceLink
TraceLink is the world's largest track and trace network for connecting the Life Sciences supply chain and eliminating counterfeit prescription drugs from the global marketplace. Leading businesses, including 16 of the top-20 global pharmaceutical companies, trust the TraceLink Life Sciences Cloud to deliver complete global connectivity, visibility and traceability of pharmaceuticals from ingredient to patient. A single point and click connection to the Life Sciences Cloud creates a supply chain control tower that delivers the information, insight and collaboration needed to improve performance and reduce risk across global supply, manufacturing and distribution operations.
A winner of numerous industry awards including Deloitte's Technology Fast 500 (ranked number 293 in 2015), the Amazon AWS Global Start-Up Challenge Grand Prize, and the Edison Award for Innovation in Health Management, the Life Sciences Cloud is used by businesses across the globe to meet strategic goals in ensuring global compliance, fighting drug counterfeiting, improving on-time and in-full delivery, protecting product quality and reducing operational cost.
For more information on TraceLink and our solutions, visit www.tracelink.com or follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.
TraceLink is funded by FirstMark Capital, Volition Capital and F-Prime Capital.
About OPC and Open SCS
OPC is the interoperability standard for the secure and reliable exchange of data in the industrial automation space and in other industries. It is platform independent and ensures the seamless flow of information among devices from multiple vendors. The OPC Foundation is responsible for the development and maintenance of this standard.
Open-SCS is a commercial open source member subscription, combining the advantages of open source and the group membership allows members to efficiently and rapidly develop technology to deliver independent and open solutions. Open-SCS was founded with the mission of enabling member organizations to benefit from the open source ethos of non-proprietary open standards and specifications built on innovation, independence and an open architecture.
For more information visit the Open SCS page at https://opcfoundation.org/open-scs-working-group/
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