How serialization help to manage Medical Devices?

Globalization of trade gives healthcare manufacturers and distributors a tough challenge to streamline their process. Medical device and surgical equipment pass through many entities during their journey to the patient. Often these devices are manufactured in one country and exported across borders to healthcare bodies. As distribution extends geographically the supply chain operations become more fragmented.

Weak oversight capacity of the supply chain raises the risk of falsified and substandard medical products, also induce stock-out and expired product issues. This can result in a loss of public confidence and brand reputation. So it is necessary to address these vulnerabilities and take a holistic approach to strengthen supply chain efficiency and integrity to ensure patient's safety

Serialization is the process of assigning a unique number to a sealable unit and associate information of the product with this number such as manufacturing date, weight, part number, model number company information, and more. This number is used for inventory tracking and identify the product for a replacement or find a compatible format.

Managing Medical Devices through serialization

Implementing serialization for medical device manufacturing and distribution has numerous benefits. It fully automates the production and inventory movement handling and eliminates the risk associate with mishandling or product misplace issues. With serial number track and trace become easy and product originality can be identified accurately.

1. Production Planning

Serialization at the production level enhances traceability and increases the efficiency of the product line. It helps to reduce set up time and assist in production planning. Implementation of a serialized tracing solution during the manufacturing phase will help to keep the integrity of data of different components of devices and help to assemble these components accurately after production.

2. Real-Time Monitoring

The serialization enables us to trace and track each device and its parts in a real-time environment as it moves through the supply chain. This helps to understand the current status of healthcare inventory and the need for items to be restocked. Serialization allows monitoring of key stability parameters for medical devices in real-time such as temperature, humidity, light, etc.

3. Easy Product Recall

Managing product Recall is one of the challenging tasks for manufacturing companies. Timely tracking of product location and response is the essence of it. Serialization helps to tackle the recall issues smoothly by consolidating consumer data and retrieve devices safely across territories to satisfy the distributors or retailers.

4. Tackling Counterfeit Products

The medical supply chain is vulnerable to theft and counterfeit products. Serialization help to uphold product ownership and identify the entry of any counterfeit or substandard product in the supply chain circle. The unique serial number assigned to the product or batch produced allows us to identify the originality of the product and track the device even years after it leaves the production lines.

5. Access to Detailed Information

With serial Numbers, the complete information regarding the product can be entered such as origin, manufacturing process, manufacturing date, company information, expiry date, etc. This information is to be entered just one time only during assigning the serial number and can be retrieved with this serial number at any time on any device. This will allow both distributors and consumers to have complete knowledge about the product.

Serialization is the new reality for the medical industries although there are costs and resources involved in its implementation but it will bring multiple benefits and help the production and supply chain operations to run smoothly. Which will in return bring business benefits and help gain customer satisfaction and loyalty for the brand.

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