The pharmaceutical packaging industry has undergone a lot of improvements over the years.
And the implementation of emerging technology has paved the way for businesses to seek more creative solutions, develop their practices, and improve efficiencies across the supply chain.
In addition, the demand for medicine and medical devices is growing globally, prompting pharmaceutical packaging manufacturers to take note of a variety of emerging trends. This includes changes in market demographics, control and serialization, and developments in technology for printing equipment.
In the past, converters were used to generating very stable product lines. Today, under the same prescription, there are more and more personalized therapies and combinations of various medications, making various labels and cartons to need shorter runs. It required pharmaceutical firms to change their products and packaging more often.
We’ll now discuss three trends in the pharmaceutical packaging industry and the impact they may have on the supply chain.
Generally speaking, packaging has traditionally been seen as an extension of production activities, meaning that contract manufacturing organizations (CMOs) have taken responsibility for manufacturing and packaging to provide their clients with a full-service production solution.
However, as demand for packaging services continues to rise, contract packaging organizations (CPOs) have taken a more prominent role in the pharmaceutical supply chain over the last few years. Consequently, the market size of pharmaceutical packaging is projected to hit more than €128 billion by 2025.
This is attributed to various factors, including the rising complexity of packaging requirements as more advanced products are sold, and new regulations are being enforced across multiple locations.
A CPO offers a bulk packaging service for traditional packaging, whereby vast quantities of pharmaceutical products are primary and secondary packaged and ready for a particular market. The item is then transported to the country for which it is intended, stored in a warehouse until it is needed. Although commonly adopted, due to unpredictable demand, this method most often generates a lot of waste product and incurs high inventory costs across multiple locations.
However, companies have been pursuing the concept of late-stage customization or postponement packaging in recent years, whereby blank product components such as blister packs, boxes, and leaflets are stored in the central warehouse and are only personalized when there is a need for a particular market. Within hours of receiving the order, the product can then be delivered to the client.
A CPO offers a bulk packaging service for traditional packaging, whereby vast quantities of pharmaceutical products are primary and secondary packaged and ready for a particular market. The item is then transported to the country for which it is intended, stored in a warehouse until it is needed. Although commonly adopted, due to unpredictable demand, this method most often generates a lot of waste product and incurs high inventory costs across multiple locations.
However, companies have been pursuing the concept of late-stage customization or postponement packaging in recent years, whereby blank product components such as blister packs, boxes, and leaflets are stored in the central warehouse and are only personalized when there is a need for a particular market. Within hours of receiving the order, the product can then be delivered to the client.
In the pharmaceutical packaging industry, serialization continues to be a major priority as well. Implementing mandatory barcodes and handling and transferring the enormous quantities of produced data increases pharmaceutical packaging difficulty and ensures that businesses face optimizing their activities to meet these needs.
As a result, many drug manufacturers have been reluctant to accept serialization. They are now struggling to place the necessary infrastructure to meet their own or their customers’ needs. In particular, the cost has also been a huge obstacle for small to medium-sized contract manufacturing organizations (CMOS), as the onboarding phase can mean a delayed return on investment for their customers (ROI).
Serialization possesses the ability to disrupt the supply chain and contribute to better cross-company collaboration. This will not only entail a more integrated and simplified approach to selling new medicines but also ensure that we continue to deliver health care securely and at a reasonable price as an industry.
Finally, as the pharmaceutical packaging industry keeps evolving, numerous social, economic, and technical factors started to affect its course.
The need for better customer education, increased product delivery, and a higher degree of competition that pharmaceutical packaging manufacturers and suppliers cannot disregard seems to be the key driving force behind this inevitable transition.
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