Integral traceability system for improving the control of all the company’s production and distribution processes

Requirements

The IK TRACE system implemented by ULMA at GSK, resulted from the pharmaceutical company’s need to ensure the traceability of all its trays and the items that leave its production lines.

Proposed solution

The system’s main function is to store the tray control data (situation of the tray, state of cleanliness, number of use cycles and current batch) and the tracing information (for subsequent generation of reports).

Likewise, IK Trace identifies the trays using a Datamatrix code and associates each of the pieces of information received from the factory’s management system, including the batch details, product description, code, date of product, date of expiry, number of units, measurement unit, sequence number of the tray within the batch and the production PO number.

As Luis García of GSK explains, the process of implementing the system required a longer-than-normal trial and validation process, as it required intervention in the production processes, although the decision to implement the project was worth it, given that “it has very positively changed our working methods, both in terms of production and conditioning of aerosols“, he adds.

Result

The implementation of the traceability system IK Trace has brought GSK some substantial advantages, as Luis García affirms: “On the one hand, the system allows us to automatically separate the trays that need to be sent to be cleaned. On the other hand, it has improved the production process, as the batch information is now associated to each tray, which means that printing and applying labels is no longer necessary in certain products“.

IK Trace represents “a good platform for implementing, in a simple manner, new applications for tracing products, or improvements to productivity“, as the GSK executive points out.