Chain of custody is at top of mind for professionals across a majority of industries — food, drug, chemical, pharma, and medical.
This critical course that products take from manufacturing/production to the end customer cannot afford to go sideways. Regardless of the size of your enterprise, your business strives to ensure that your chain of custody remains compliant.
The most errors occurring in chain of custody result from poor systems, operations and management.
The price of not having a better management system in place is huge. Legal ramifications and financial consequences to name two heavy hitters. Your business’ reputation as another.
How do you begin in developing a better management system? To start, you find a solution that offers systemization and workflows, integrations with the rest of your operations and other systems, and centralized document storage. While there are several solutions available, we recommend BarTender®, a barcode and label software with critical elements of the logistics, compliance, and traceability approaches of the world’s supply chains.
DEFINE AND BUILD YOUR PROCESS
Defining and building your chain of custody process will likely be based on your industry’s requirements. Regardless of industry specifications, you want your chain of custody process to include an unprecedented level of transparency to discourage improper handling or lack of compliance with procedures. Additionally, you want that process to include the ability to pinpoint the source of any problem or diagnose any original cause or history of a product if something seriously affects a customer. A robust chain of custody of affected goods/products reduces recalls, disruptions, costs, and impact on the company’s reputation.
Once you start to define your process within the context of your industry, you’ll want a solution that can already account for those requirements. BarTender® allows you to define and build your process based on your industry’s standards. For example, the interoperability and communication that is required within the food supply chain can be complicate and unique, but BarTender® can help to simplify that with easy deployment and technical support. BarTender® is also set to work within the definitions and requirements of the chemical and medical-device industries.
ENSURE YOUR PROCESSES INTEGRATE WITH YOUR EXISTING SYSTEMS OR OTHER WORKFLOWS
Chain of custody includes a combination of policies, processes, and procedures. As such, it touches a variety of other systems and workflows, including material flow (think, packaging, transportation, receipt, etc.); financial flow; and information flow (think, digital data trail). Beyond that, your chain of custody also interacts with scheduling processes, shipment planning, and more. With that many interconnected processes and a ridiculous amount of data, you need a solution that can integrate with all the moving parts and pieces.
BarTender® integrates with your existing systems and/or workflows, offering centralized control.
Just think, the right system in place – one that is secure, proven, reliable – that also works with your other existing systems and processes, and scales and adapts with your business, could be the difference between successful labeling which simplifies the supply chain or a complicated one that comes at a cost. It integrates with your ERP system (from Oracle, SAP, IBM Websphere, and more) which enables automation and provides increased labeling accuracy. This results in improving efficiencies through the chain of custody process.
CENTRALIZE YOUR DOCUMENT STORAGE
With the numerous systems and processes working as part of your chain of custody, it means large data sets and a ton of documentation. Without a centralized location for document storage, there’s room for duplication, versioning errors, inaccurate information, misplaced files, and more. With all documents in one place, however, there is greater ease in tracking and managing documents.
Librarian is a companion application to BarTender®. With Librarian, you can: store files in a unified database rather than on variety of hard drives; define custom-named workflow states for files in different stages of the publishing process; and create rules to govern that workflow. Now you have single source data management with improved operational efficiency.
Ultimately, a better management system with better processes also means better chain of custody. It’s that simple.
In using a trusted and secure software solution (like BarTender®), while also achieving greater workflows, you’re reducing the possibility of human error and improving your accuracy and efficiency.
BarTender® understands the competitive, rapidly changing and complex operating environments of today’s chain of custody which is exactly what your business needs.
Schedule a demo of this product so you truly understand how it can benefit your business. Get in touch with us today. We want to help you better manage your chain of custody.
