Food and Beverage Industry: A Cost Analysis of Traceability
In a recent piece by Derek Singleton, who is the ERP Market Analyst at an online site called Software Advice, the writer makes his case that the cost of implementing a food traceability system …is going to force companies to invest a lot of money in infrastructure to meet FDA tracking and tracing standards. He’s...
GS1, Global Healthcare Collaboration, and Electronic Medical Records
According to a recent news release, this coming September, 2011, in London, a prestigious group of healthcare professionals and Roger Lamb, healthcare sector manager at GS1 UK, are convening an event to address the concerns and challenges of the European healthcare market. The event is being organized by Healthcare IQ, a division of International Quality &...
Meeting Customers’ Needs for Chemical Data
The headline on this post comes from the name of a newly minted report of 50+ pages developed by the Green Chemistry and Commerce Council. They’re a project of the Lowell Center for Sustainable Production at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. There are several really important features of this report. Most immediately it becomes quite...
World’s 10th Largest Drug Market Pushes for GS1 Serialization by 2011
According to Phil Taylor, writing for SecuringPharma, Brazil’s 191 million inhabitants represent the biggest pharmaceutical market in South America, valued at around $17bn in 2008. He notes it is the tenth largest drug market in the world. Soon, the country plans to implement a drug serialization mandate that will affect you if your company sells pharmaceuticals...
Medical Device Barcode and RFID Tips that can Streamline Joint Commission Visits
Recently, MD Publishing posted an excellent article entitled, ‘Cover Story: Strategies For Success,’ which is all about the ways in which clinical engineering professionals can and should track and manage medical devices and why this is important. The article not only spotlights the requirements of The Joint Commission, which accredits and certifies more than 18,000 health care...
Chemical Industry: With Help from Japan, GHS Enactment Expected Soon in Burma
A recent news story provided by the Myanmar Times is interesting on several fronts. It shows the continuing worldwide adoption of chemical industry standards, including labeling procedures; it confirms the industry’s preference for the United National Global Harmonization System (GHS); and, it shows once again that the industry itself is generally for rather than against industry...
Track and Trace is a Thing of Beauty in Cosmetics, Too!
I recently came across a rather breathless news release about a new industrial printing solution. That’s OK. I write a lot of somewhat over-the-top stuff, too. Happily, my boss usually tones it down. But of importance to me in this news release was a mention of the cosmetics industry’s problem
GS1 Belgium Completes 3-Year Trial of RFID-driven Drug Track and Trace
This latest update about a three-year GS1 pilot to test end-to-end supply chain product tracking shows that people are thinking about the right kinds of problems. But still missing from much of the analysis of RFID- and GPS-based solutions is the cost analysis part of the equation. It doesn’t seem to me we need another test...
Chemical Industry: GHS Worldwide Compliance Dates, Real and Projected
A company that is all about color printers recently posted an item on its blog in which the connection is made between colored labels and pictograms and emerging Global Harmonization Standards (GHS) taking shape worldwide. There is much good information in the piece about how and why color and pictograms are required on chemical labels...
Chemical Industry: GHS and The Gambia: Can Total Voluntary Global Compliance Be Long in Coming?
Thanks to a recent article in Afrique en ligne we learn of The Gambia’s commitment to GHS. The piece intrigued me because there are less than two million people in The Gambia and it is only about twice the size of Delaware, according to a government site run by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Here’s my...
GHS and Regulatory Labeling Challenges in the New Era 
