I had the pleasure of attending and presenting at this year’s PIMS Annual Packaging Innovation Leadership Summit last week.
My presentation was about developing and sustaining labeling and artwork capabilities, a topic which I have blogged on many times and, of course, there is also that book that I wrote, a great alternative to sleeping pills 😉
The first day of the conference had a lot of presents on the theme of business going digital, new ways to access patients through digital and the use of big data in pharma.
Typically, labeling and artwork transformations programs in the Pharma and Biotech area have been primarily justified on the basis of compliance and reducing the risk of recalls. The discussions at the conference reinforced another justification theme which I think should become much more prevalent in the coming years – speed or velocity.
There are at least two areas where this theme is going to become ever more important….
Firstly, the obvious need to execute labeling and artwork changes more rapidly, be it to get to market quicker, or to respond to the increasing need to execute safety changes in a short period. One member of the audience at the conference, who worked for a large Pharma company, pointed out that they struggled to do an artwork change in 6 months, let alone implement a safety change.
Secondly, the need to get labeling information distributed quickly to the many different channels of electronic information that will need to be serviced. This is a particular challenge for labeling as it is imperative that what the consumer of the information sees is a true and complete representative representation of the intended information. I am reminded of the issues I have trying to review documents on an iPhone, the problem being that often text is missing, graphics are in the wrong place and/or the wrong size etc.
I wonder what other trends you see in this area?