Advanco and PCE team up for track-and-trace

Two European companies, Belgian’s Advanco and Pharmacontrol Electronic (PCE) GmbH of Germany, have joined forces to help drugmakers implement electronic pedigrees and serialization of their products down to the unit level.

The firms are offering a centralised system that can trace individual items by receiving data from every single point in the supply chain, according to Advanco, which has a long-standing collaboration with enterprise resource planning software company SAP in this area.

PCE is a specialist in pharmaceutical packaging inspection and integrated track-and-trace systems, and is the primary supplier to the Turkish pharmaceutical industry as it implements the country’s data matrix-based medicine serialisation scheme which is due to start tracking drugs in June 2010.

“The biggest Turkish pharmaceutical manufactures have been selecting PCE as the sole platform for pharma track-and-trace,” said the two companies in a statement.

Along with SAP, Advanco brings expertise in integrating the track-and-trace technology within an e-Pedigree and serialisation system to the collaboration, based on barcode, 2D data matrix and radiofrequency identification (RFID) tagging.