For larger organisations, where there will be a number of sites, packaging lines and possibly distribution operations to enable for serialisation, developing standard solutions has proved very useful in enabling roll-out in a timely and resource efficient way.
Serialisation systems are complex and therefore not trivial to design and implement. The various solutions also need to interface effectively with each other. Selecting and developing standard solutions therefore provides an opportunity to design and prove capabilities once and significantly reduce the overall timeline, cost and risk of subsequent implementations.
In complex organisations, it is unlikely that it will be practical to develop single solutions for capabilities such as the packing lines. However, it should be possible to achieve significant simplification by adopting this approach and selecting a small number of standard solutions and or methodologies.
A knock-on impact of this approach is that there needs to be time built into the project plans to enable this approach to be successful. The initial implementations need to be given the time and resources to develop well thought through and comprehensive solutions. Furthermore, ideally these solutions need to be implemented and optimized before rolling out subsequent solutions so that learning can be built into these later implementations. Unfortunately, given the long lead times of developing and implementing initial solutions, time is rapidly running out for companies wanting to fully benefit from this approach.
I hope you enjoyed this instalment on Things we wish we had known before starting a serialisation program or project. Please check back in next week for the continuation in this series.
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