Vaccine manufacturers are outsourcing packaging serialization, what about you? - Covectra

Global demand for Covid-19 vaccines has prompted some companies that are normally rivals to develop strategic partnerships to produce and distribute approved vaccines. A recent example includes Pfizer/BioNTech entering into agreements with both Novartis and Sanofi to ramp up vaccine production. As other manufacturers have begun to join forces and collaborate in similar ways, new supply chain bottlenecks have surfaced like cold chain capacity/storage requirements and the lack of packaging serialization expertise to track-and-trace the vaccines throughout the supply chain.

Like the strategic production partnerships, vaccine manufacturers have been outsourcing their packaging serialization needs to contract packagers. The demand has been so high that some clients we work with have been scrambling to procure new equipment to increase throughput, only to find themselves on long waiting lists. The spike in demand for packaging serialization will not be short-lived as the virus continues to efficiently mutate and the need to develop and distribute new booster shots worldwide is expected to continue.

Some contract packaging organizations are missing out these opportunities because they lack serialization capabilities and are under the misconception that developing an operational serialization solution will take too much time or be too costly. That may have been a fact in the past, but not anymore.

Covectra has developed a service delivery model that provides high level support, and reduces the project implementation time in the following four ways:

1. Level of Service – our engineering and IT staff will work with your team every step of the way to design, configure, install, and train your staff on our turnkey serialization line and cloud solutions. Covectra solutions were built from the ground up specifically for serialization and are so intuitive, customers often have serialization in production in a matter of hours after installation.
2. Fully Automated Solutions – our fully automated systems will enable you to meet the expected production throughput vaccine manufacturers will require of their partners.
3. Agnostic Technology – our solutions use off-the-shelf scanners, printers, vision systems that eliminate the risk of using proprietary hardware. Our system integrates with all the industry standard printer systems that are designed with serialization features. The flexibility of this platform allows us to reduce the time to implement resulting in lower overall project costs.
4. Financing Options – we understand some companies may be challenged by the capex requirements to develop a vaccine-level serialization solution. Covectra is willing to defer those upfront capex costs over time to improve the likelihood that your company and our partnership succeeds.

The Covid-19 pandemic is challenging people, governments and companies to find innovative ways to work together. While vaccines continue to be developed and production ramped up, the supply chain that enables needles to reach arms still offers a great deal of opportunity for those who have the vision and desire to contribute to this global effort.

Covectra is prepared to help by examining what makes your company unique and developing a serialization solution that will enable you to become a valued partner in the fight against Covid-19, or for any other serialization needs that you have.