PR: Systech continues global expansion with move into India

Systech International, a global leader in serialization, traceability, and brand protection technologies, has established an office in Mumbai, India in response to a growing need for its solutions and an expanding client base in the region.

To further support its entry, Systech will convene its next Uniquity Global Conference in Mumbai on October 6, 2016, featuring a roster of prominent guest speakers. The focus of Uniquity India will be on global serialization regulations affecting the pharmaceutical industry and how effective technologies will be necessary to meet a wide range of compliance requirements. Attendance at this exclusive event is by invitation only, with confirmation to selected qualified representatives.

Robert DeJean, CEO of Systech International, states, “With the incredible opportunity to service the pharmaceutical industry comes the demand for globally-compliant solutions that meet the vast array of complex regulations that continue to evolve. As a result, there’s a need for solutions that are comprehensive, versatile, and cost-effective. Systech’s industry-leading serialization and track-and-trace offerings have been proven for more than 30 years as the best solutions to meet this need.”

Pharmaceutical manufacturers in India supply a high volume of superior quality medicines to every market in the world, and the nation’s pharmaceutical export segment has more than doubled from $7.8bn in 2008 to $16.5bn in 2014, according to the Indian Ministry of Commerce and Industry. In 2016, sales are expected to increase by nearly 84 per cent to $26.1bn with generic drugs dominating, accounting for nearly 70 per cent of the market. Furthermore, over 55 per cent of exports from India are to highly regulated markets whose governments have enacted stringent serialization and tracing regulations.

"The problem is that no two of these regulations are the same, and therefore Indian exporters must not only comply with all the individual mandates, but also keep abreast of a rapidly-changing regulatory landscape," notes Dr. Avi Chaudhuri, who is spearheading Systech's India expansion. "Our core commitments to the industry are that we provide a comprehensive set of solutions and ensure full compliance against any and all new regulations that come into force."

Systech International offers a full suite of software applications to manage these complex requirements, allowing serialization mandates to be met anywhere in the world — including the export serialization requirements of the Indian Directorate General of Foreign Trade (DGFT). Systech is already seeing significant demand for its solutions as Indian pharmaceutical companies rush toward complying with the looming deadlines for key regulations such as the US DSCSA, EU FMD, and others.

According to Harry Saint-Preux, Director, Global Alliances & Channels, "Systech is the only provider in the world that offers a complete palette of solutions encompassing serialization, aggregation, reporting, rework, and enterprise traceability. Companies that implement Systech's stack obtain a unified solution to cover the entirety of pharmaceutical requirements. This unique capability increases the value we bring to our clients."

The demand for Systech's services in India is also due to the versatility of its offerings. By being hardware-agnostic, Systech can collaborate with a multitude of local vendors and integrators who have served the Indian market with distinction. Many pharmaceutical companies have already made significant investments in line-level hardware. Systech can work with such existing setups to preserve those past investments, and therefore deploy only the subset of its highly configurable solutions that would be needed to complete the task toward DSCSA or other regulatory compliance. This in turn makes for a highly economical offering to its prospective clients.

The combination of advantages offered by Systech also makes it particularly attractive to contract manufacturers and packagers. Mid-market companies that offer services to other drug manufacturers must develop and follow a program of adding multiple serialization-related capabilities to all of their packaging lines within the next 15 months, or risk losing their business to competitors who are DSCSA-compliant. Systech’s product suite is extremely attractive to the Indian SME sector because it is designed to work with a wide array of packaging and labeling equipment to ensure cost containment.

In addition to its serialization and traceability solutions, Systech is also introducing its highly acclaimed, award-winning brand protection technology, UniSecure. Pharmaceutical and consumer brands are major targets of counterfeiters in Asian markets. UniSecure offers a revolutionary approach to global brand protection due to its immunity from many of the problems that affect other anti-counterfeiting solutions. As an example, UniSecure does not require brand owners to fit any printers on the packaging line, or to make major investments for variable coding.

According to Chaudhuri, "The biggest benefit to UniSecure is its non-additive and non-intrusive technology, instead using an existing overt mark already produced during packaging – such as a linear barcode – to create a unique covert identifier. The UniSecure technology does not require addition of any print matter on a package, and yet it can be used with serialized barcodes to create a highly robust solution that simply cannot be copied or reverse-engineered. In effect, it serializes a non-serialized product and, in doing so, averts all of the security issues that have been problematic with use of mass serialization purely for brand protection."

About Systech International

Systech is the global technology leader in product safety, and consumer and brand protection. Systech pioneered serialization and is defining the future of authentication. Trusted by 19 of the top 20 pharmaceutical companies, Systech unifies and optimizes enterprise serialization, track and trace, and authentication technologies to ensure regulatory compliance, mitigate risk, and drive efficiency and profitability. For 30 years, Systech’s innovation has led best practices for key brands across the pharmaceutical, life science, food and beverage, and consumer packaged goods industries.