Two German companies have developed digital-twin technology to improve traceability and trust along the pharmaceutical supply chain.

Gerresheimer is a provider of healthcare and drug delivery systems and Merck KGaA is a science and technology company.

They have developed a proof of concept (PoC) that aims to transform the pharma supply chain by creating digital twins for primary packaging. Through a single interconnected network, participants will benefit from traceability and digital trust, resulting in cost savings, improved quality and even new business models, thanks to process automation.

“We are convinced that our primary packaging will become the key to enable supply networks across organisations and lead to faster process operations and data-informed decision making,” said Daniel Diezi, vice president at Gerresheimer.

Thomas Endress, executive director at Merck KGaA, added: “At our company, we develop digital innovations to help companies exploit the exciting advantages of the industrial internet of things and create digital twins they can really trust. We are proud to be a digital sparring partner to help Gerresheimer realise this by putting our patented digital technologies at their service.”

With the jointly developed technology, Gerresheimer’s physical primary packaging is provided with a trusted key, enabling access to its digital twin. Primary packaging, such as syringes or vials, travel through the whole supply chain, from production to the point of care, connecting and collecting information that will be linked to their unique ID. They become the key to unlocking data coming from numerous digital ecosystems, enabling more efficient collaboration among organisations in the supply network.

Implemented on Gerresheimer products, it uses a blockchain-based platform and multi-patented authentication technologies developed by Merck KGaA to anchor physical objects securely in the digital world. Combined with Industry 4.0 standards, this makes it trustworthy and reliable.

The joint PoC comprises physical syringes with a secure unique ID, a smartphone application, and access to the digital platform of Merck to unlock the digital twin features. The smartphone app is accessible to authorised stakeholders such as brand owners and quality assurance officers of the manufacturer. After authenticating the syringe and reading the unique ID, the authorised user can access features such as quality data on demand, root-cause analysis data and customer complaint handling:

• Quality data on demand: retrieving the machine-readable certificate of analysis as well as cosmetic and dimensional inspection data.
• Customer complaint handling: streamlined complaint handling from brand owner to manufacturer and dashboard-like overview.
• Root cause analysis: product-related data such as specifications and aggregation across different packaging levels combined with quality-related data make it possible to examine errors and spot potential sources for mistakes at the container level.

In this particular case, as in pharmaceutical supply chains where many specialists contribute to overall success, Gerresheimer and Merck intend to onboard further parties to build additional seamless multiparty offerings and exploit the full potential of traceability from production to the point of care.

As soon as additional parties, such as contract manufacturing organisations, logistics providers and regulatory bodies, adopt this, the potential for automated business logic grows for use cases such as automated M2M generation of certificates and its exchange across different parties.