MHI Solutions Improving Supply Chain Performance
Solutions Spotlight
The SLAM Industry Group, which focuses on the automation of scanning, labeling, applying and manifesting, has now started a new Pharmacy Fulfillment Committee to educate the pharmaceutical industry on how SLAM members can best handle the special requirements for handling prescription medications and other sensitive items.
The SLAM group is composed of companies that integrate conveyors, scanners, printers, robotics and controls to perform the SLAM process for a warehouse, said Alex Kinkade, senior manager of sales and marketing for MHI member StreamTech Engineering.
That entails identifying a package, gathering the dimensions and weights of that package, putting in the necessary documents, closing it, putting a shipping label or some sort of compliance label or multiple labels on it, and then verifying that it was done correctly before sorting it for outbound fulfillment, Kinkade said.
Feeding individual prescriptions onto the conveyor, scanning and labeling them with patient information.
“For the pharmaceutical industry, the same principles apply, but there are some unique aspects of fulfilling prescriptions and pharmaceutical items that demand higher levels of accuracy and privacy,” he said.
The software information interfaces for pharmaceutical orders incorporate lot coding, similar to how it’s done for food and beverage—anything that is produced to a higher level of quality, said Bob Miller, PE, applications engineer for StreamTech. This enhances recall response if there’s ever a problem with the item that’s being fulfilled.
“The liability bars can be higher for handling things like Schedule 2 drugs—if those are mishandled, the entities could be flirting with civil or criminal liability,” Miller said. “So, when working in a pharma environment, there will be additional validation, testing and commissioning before the system is used for customer orders.”
Whereas a regular distributor might weigh a package at a certain point in the process, a pharmaceutical distributor might weigh a package at additional areas of the process, he said. There might be additional barcode capture, such as parity checking to make sure that the patient information is correct. The total order information is validated multiple times with barcode scanning. SLAM members also use more sophisticated means to ensure privacy of the information.
A series of high-volume end-of-line systems to scan, weigh, dimension and label packages, each line paired to its own carton sealer.
One of the plus sides of this heightened validation standard is that the pharmaceutical company itself will take on that responsibility for the technology provider—they will set the expectation, so SLAM members don’t have to come up with all the standards and rules to help them comply, Kinkade said. They will provide the validation metrics that SLAM members need to sign off on the project—or even initiate the project from the beginning.
“The head pharmacist who is responsible for the facility will want to have a clear understanding of the way the system works and will want to have a high level of comfort with the verification that the entire process is accurate—because their name is on the prescriptions,” he said.
Currently, many pharmaceutical companies are manually packaging, labeling and bagging prescription medications, but with some type of automation or process simplification, they could do it more efficiently, said Greg Berguig, president of MHI member PAC Machinery.
“They would still have an operator involved, but that operator would be more productive, so they could do it quicker, with less steps,” Berguig said.
Click here to read the full feature.