"The Systech single-tenant environment enabled us to perform updates based on our specific timeline and requirements and helped us avoid the disruption and lost productivity of forced vendor upgrades and downtime."

 

Customer

This publicly held company, with 10,000+ global employees and over 80 years of experience, is a leading provider of flexible manufacturing and packaging solutions for pharmaceutical, biologic and consumer health clients around the world.

Challenge

With Drug Supply Chain Security Act (DSCSA) compliance requiring secure, serialized data exchange, the need for a scalable EPCIS system became mandatory. The brand selected a Level 4 (L4) provider in 2015/2016 to comply. Over time, their total cost of ownership escalated as the new system showed operational weaknesses:

  • Overly dependent on customization and excessive programming.
  • Too expensive: Customer onboarding had to be done consecutively versus concurrently.
  • Not scalable enough to meet customer demands and supply chain rework operations.
  • Unable to provide a consistent level of customer support.

Multi-tenant environment subject to disruption and lost productivity of forced vendor upgrades and downtime. Having to share their infrastructure with their vendor’s other customers put their customers at risk of data and security breaches.

In need of a fully functional solution that was fast to implement and quick to scale, with minimum interruption and cost, the brand turned to Systech.

Solution

Both companies met to discuss Systech’s cloud-based track-and-trace solution as a potential L4 platform replacement to:

  1. Resolve existing system issues.
  2. Upgrade product serialization capabilities to meet compliance requirements and address gaps in supply chain rework.
  3. Reduce costs and improve speed of deployment.

Systech won the business after performing a one-month “proof-of-concept” to validate that its traceability solution could meet the brand’s goals.

Warehouse and distribution functionality were core drivers. Systech provided a solution set that included label printing, receiving, picking, packing, unpacking, shipping, sampling, returns, QA release and ERP integration for sales orders.

The existing packaging operation incorporated a multi-vendor strategy across the enterprise, whereas the agnostic Systech L4 environment represents a single system configured to connect with all available line/ site solutions.

Systech is one of the few providers that offers two different variations of the cloud environment—single tenancy and multi-tenancy. The single tenant is a dedicated cloud environment where the customer can choose when to perform updates as they are pushed out based on their specific timelines and requirements—not those dictated by the vendor.

After dealing with a vendor who forced release updates on them several times each year in the multi-tenant environment, the customer opted for Systech’s single tenant environment.

"Systech’s track-and-trace software is so user intuitive that we were able to perform about 50 percent of new customer connections ourselves, including configuration and documentation."

Unlike other offerings, the Systech solution is not customized. It’s a flexible platform that can be configured to align with customer specific needs. Plus, Systech provides an all-remote training program. Intuitive software enables approximately 50 percent of new customer connections—including configuration and documentation—to be performed without Systech involvement.

Results

Systech was initially awarded a one-year contract structured to include a competitive, flexible-pricing model and a fixed-cost, standard configurations model that matched the brand’s onboarding schedule. This enabled them to accelerate client connections at a more favorable cost. With a set goal of completing a total of 80 customer connections across a specified schedule, 48 customers (60%) were connected and live mid-way through the timeframe.

 

Next Steps

The brand now uses Systech’s traceability solution as its single, L4 EPCIS platform, and has extended its agreement with Systech to a three-year term so they can continue expanding their installed customer base.

 

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