PALO ALTO, CA /BUSINESS WIRE/ -- Blue Vector Systems announced that a Fortune 500 pharmaceutical manufacturer has selected the company's industry-leading intelligent edge solution to satisfy the Turkish Ministry of Health's (MOH) serialization requirements, set to go into effect on January 1, 2009. With the MOH requirements accelerating the decision to adopt the next-generation technology, the investment in Blue Vector's solution is also expected to yield significant ROI-based business benefits, stemming from operational efficiencies and streamlined distribution processes.
Representing a well-established pharmaceutical manufacturing base, with more than 300 companies in the Turkish pharmaceutical market (of which over 50 are foreign owned), Turkey has taken the lead as one of the first countries in the world to mandate transport-package and saleable-unit serialization and dictate specific product identification and labeling requirements. Specifically, the Turkish MOH's amended regulations require serializing and tracking, using barcode technology for all transport packages—such as pallets, parcels, boxes, or bundles—as well as all unit-level items reimbursed by MOH, including promotional samples, hospital packaged products, prescription drugs, and nonprescription drugs.
The Blue Vector system will enable the global pharmaceutical manufacturer to gain greater order fulfillment and shipping accuracy from its distribution operations—such as ensuring correct products and quantities—as well as streamlined processes for faster reimbursement from the Turkish MOH. Other expected benefits include enhanced brand and consumer protection, greater counterfeiting and grey market detection, improved returns and recall processes, and vastly improved inventory visibility.
With Blue Vector's solution—enabling distributed processing and intelligent delivery to manage a wide range of diverse and distributed processes simultaneously—the pharmaceutical manufacturer will be able to centrally manage serialization with little disruption to its existing operations. Receiving both serialized and nonserialized product from its parent company and third parties, the manufacturer's distribution center will require the capability to handle a variety of tasks including serializing nonserialized product, managing and receiving serialized product, matching serialized product with delivery notices, sending data files to MOH, and performing exception processing and local data archival.
"This leading pharmaceutical company didn't have the luxury of spending yet more time debating and testing possible solutions. They needed to find a proven solution that met the requirements of the approaching mandates," said Mike Gardner, Blue Vector President and CEO. "They determined that Blue Vector possessed not only a track record of success working with pharmaceutical organizations, but also the technical flexibility and scalability required to fully deploy and integrate our solution in their environment within such a compressed timeframe. Although the mandate provided the catalyst for change, the company chose Blue Vector because our solution enabled them to achieve tangible business benefits from serialization."
With the ability to scale to support even the most distributed supply chains, Blue Vector's technology is uniquely capable of managing a wide variety of wireless sensors—from RFID to 1D and 2D barcode to GPS and temperature sensors—enabling global enterprises to gain unprecedented intelligence, visibility, and control over their manufacturing, distribution, and supply chain processes. By delivering contextual business intelligence to the edge of operations and enabling critical decision making where the work is done, Blue Vector's sense and respond software enables businesses to correct errors in real time for 100% shipping accuracy, track and authenticate high-value items throughout their supply chains, shrink order and sales cycle times, and automatically replenish inventories, among other benefits.
About Blue Vector
Blue Vector Systems is the trusted choice of industry leaders who are revolutionizing their operations by extending the reach of their current business processes to the edge of their operations. An offshoot of groundbreaking research into highly distributed military sensor networks, Blue Vector's technology puts RFID, barcode, temperature, GPS and motion sensors to work for leading businesses who need to control remote inventory, improve their shipping accuracy, monitor the movement of assets, or track the progress of individual items throughout their supply chain. The company is headquartered in Palo Alto, CA.