Fast Series was featured at this year’s Interphex.

Optel Vision, a supplier of inspection and serialization systems for the pharmaceutical industry, has announced the launch of its new Fast Series, a line of preconfigured track-and-trace products that, it says, “are specially designed to help pharmaceutical manufacturers meet compliance requirements, fast.” These were available for demonstration at the company booth at Interphex in New York from March 21-23.

“Many small pharmaceutical companies in the U.S. haven’t started their serialization process yet and they are finding themselves in a difficult situation, because time is running out for the delivery of full-scale systems,” commented Louis Roy, President of Optel Vision. The company added that the Fast Series can be delivered within six weeks.

Optel Vision has recently expanded its headquarters in Quebec City, Canada, with an additional building which doubled office and production capacity. It has also developed a streamlined and dedicated manufacturing process for Fast Series units. Two more manufacturing facilities have been added at other sites. The company now has four main operation centers in Canada, Ireland, India and Brazil, and over 800 employees across 20 countries. This total is projected to grow to 1,000 by the end of 2017.

The Fast Series was designed with a view to meeting the tight regulation deadlines imposed by the Drug Supply Chain Security Act in the U.S. and the Falsified Medicines Directive in Europe. They were specifically developed to accommodate various product sizes, speeds and print. Optel Vision claims that the Fast Series offers users “optimum scalability and flexibility opportunities for their future serialization expansion,” based on its experience in over 2,000 serialization projects across the world.

The Fast Series can also be combined with Optel Vision’s Open SiteMaster (OSM) software to control serialization. Launched in July 2016, Version 2.0 of OSM is described as “a Level 3 server software with a web-based user and machine interface, covering all aspects of track-and-trace and aggregation, while streamlining communications between serialization-related systems.”

OSM 2.0 was designed in collaboration with pharmaceutical and contract packers of various sizes. It is now being integrated into dozens of multi-line serialization and aggregation projects in the U.S. and Europe, according to Etienne Gagnon, President of Optel Vision.

The system’s architecture is specially designed to adapt to customer-specific business logic and IT environments and to evolve as needed. It acts as a hub that co-ordinates actions at all levels, gathering data from the packaging lines (Level 2) and communicating information through the existing ERP or other systems (Level 3) and up to the corporate level (Level 4), getting serial numbers and sending back EPCIS reports through a central configuration and monitoring point.

According to a study by MarketsandMarkets that was published in February, Optel Vision is the leading player in its field of pharmaceutical serialization systems, with an overall market share of 25.7%. The new study, Track & Trace Solutions Market: Global Forecast to 2021, studies the healthcare track and trace systems market size by product type, application, technology and end user at regional and country levels. It forecasts that the market will enjoy a compound annual growth rate of 17.3% in the years to 2021.