January 21, 2016
Artwork and labeling development in the pharma industry involves several groups across the organization, handling these processes but in most cases external service providers support companies to streamline the entire pharmaceutical labeling and artwork lifecycle.
In last few years packaging and labeling outsourcing has gained popularity in pharma regulatory industry especially because there are service providers that offer end-to-end management of the entire process. However a lot of companies in the industry are still hesitant about outsourcing these activities.
This article brings into light various aspects of artwork and labeling outsourcing that would help companies to decide if they wish to outsource these services in future. To get started with let’s ask a few questions:
- Do you have trained professional resources to carry out this activity?
- Are your experts well acquainted with latest guidelines and rules for packaging and labeling?
- Will outsourcing these activities save you time and increase your capabilities?
- Are you capable to handle failures that may occur due to any kind of errors during the process?
If you have most of the answers as “Yes”, you are good to go. However if there is even a single “NO”, then you might want to consider outsourcing. Reports have shown that manufacturers who have outsourced these activities have a competitive advantage over others in the market.
Artwork creation process in itself is similar to developing an entirely new product for a company. The more the number of medical products launched by a company, subsequently more artwork creation process will follow the lead.
Considering the overall business strategy of a company, one aspect of it is to be able to develop high quality packaging and artwork on time, in alignment to the regulatory guidelines stated by the agency. If you wish to expand your product line and endorse them in multiple geographies as fast as possible, you need to synchronize the manufacturing and artwork creation process. And in doing so, you need to have a team that has best in class artwork creation and delivery capabilities.
Is Failure an Option?
Like we asked earlier, are you capable of handling failures that may occur due to any kind of errors during the process? This is another major factor to consider before you make a decision regarding artwork outsourcing.
A single failure due to artwork error can directly lead to severe downsides like product recalls, sale losses, and brand reputation damage. It has been observed that companies that operated with their artwork outsourcing partners witnessed trivial consequences of failure in comparison to ones that executed the activity internally.
Thus a company needs to analyze its artwork capabilities considering all the aspects that can directly disturb their overall business strategy. Even if you decide to outsource these services, make sure to be active while key quality checks are performed and major decisions are made.
If your current artwork and labeling development model is broken, it’s time fill those gaps either with more proficient internal resources or with experts of outsourced artwork service providers.
