Pharmaceutical packaging needs to adhere to strict regulations. It’s a given. Because even a minor mistake could lead to recalls.

Recently, Sun Pharmaceutical Industries had to recall cartons of drug used to treat low testosterone levels in the US market for incorrect labelling.

As per research, nearly 40% of pharmaceutical product recalls are due to labelling errors. That’s huge! Such incidents could negatively impact a brand and lead to heavy losses.

Hence, validating packaging artwork before it heads out to printing is important.

But if you think of artwork management as a cumbersome process, think again. Every common challenge that you face has a solution that you need to be aware of. The right tools for pharmaceutical artwork management can help you maximize productivity and minimize the drug’s time-to-market.

Let’s have a look.

Top 3 Obstacles in Pharmaceutical Artwork Management

Artwork management in pharmaceuticals is viewed as a tough process owing to the changing nature of the market and regulatory requirements. The most common challenge companies face are:

1. Collaboration

When it comes to artwork, collaboration is important irrespective of any industry. You need to employ an efficient platform that assists collaboration. However, most companies are still stuck with outdated methods.

For example, emails. Although emails are convenient and popularly used for communication, they aren’t the best means to keep track of feedback and changes. In fact, if the team uses multiple channels such as phone, chat, this becomes all the more difficult.

2. Validation

In pharma, changing regulatory environmental and regional specifications are common. Since the pharmaceutical supply chain operates globally, companies need to take into account both Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) guidelines and local safety measures.

Legal teams need to carefully proof artwork changes and validate them against norms.

If packaging artwork work is translated to a regional script or braille, you’ll need to have experts evaluate it. Goes without saying, incorrect information on the pharmaceutical packaging can lead to warnings or hefty fines.

3. Resource Access

When designing pharmaceutical labelling, you’ll need constant access to multiple files. These could contain information on the chemical composition, the core datasheet, or compliance rules. Easy storage, retrieval, and management of these files often become a challenge if they are stored across multiple locations and as different file formats.

How To Maximize Productivity in Pharmaceutical Artwork Management

The challenges pharmaceutical companies face when managing artwork relate to managing resources, communication, and collaboration efficiently. Here’s when tools can help. A tool like Artwork Flow provides companies a practical approach to eliminate proofing errors and maximize productivity

An artwork management software helps with:

1. Online Proofing

Proofing tools can root out human-errors to a great extent. A tool like an online spell-checker is helpful for proofreading industry-specific content. It highlights all the wrong spellings in the packaging artwork and suggests corrections. And, helps avoid spelling mistakes which can lead to serious legal implications in pharmaceutical packaging labels.

2. Version Control

While working in a collaborative environment, it is essential to ensure that everybody is looking at the right version at any point in time. Since pharmaceutical packaging artwork approval involves handling several data sets, managing documents in a uniform file-format is essential.

Version control helps keep track of revisions, easily understand changes, and make collaborative editing error-free.

3. Easy Data Access

Artwork Flow provides a cloud asset library that is a repository of all reusable brand assets like logo, labelling and packaging templates and more. This helps ensure that resources are available to all stakeholders throughout the packaging development and product release.

Important files such as the Company Core Data Sheet (CCDS) - can be managed and accessed from a single point.

4. Multi-lingual Support

Some advanced artwork management packages allow in-built content translation with a high degree of accuracy - making it easy to translate packaging labels into different languages based on the regions where you want to sell the product.

5. Global Online Approval

Pharmaceutical packaging is dynamic and laws often change across geographies. What works in one country might not work in another. This means that teams in different locations need to make sure the pharmaceutical packaging artwork is compliant. Artwork management software usually provides various tools for easy collaboration. For example, Artwork Flow offers an Annotation feature that allows reviewers to drop pins and comment on artwork files.

Endnote  

Artwork management in the pharmaceutical industry encompasses project management, label regulatory control, watching market trends, and resource management. An efficient pharmaceutical artwork management software can be a reliable option for pharma manufacturers to streamline their packaging processes and keep pace with the changing market dynamics.

What are your thoughts? What are the challenges you face when designing pharmaceutical packaging artwork? Do you think a tool like Artwork Flow can help you? Comment below!